By the middle of January in Tallahassee, when the natural and planted food is turning into compost, I supplement my quails’ diet with cracked corn or milo—milo is cheaper and doesn’t sour as quickly—in twenty or so feeders set in good cover throughout the farm. This feeds the cotton rats, as well as adding fat to my birds’ diminishing body weights. If nighttime temperatures drop below freezing for more than a few days, I broadcast grain from an electric spreader on the tailgate of the truck in those places I have seen or heard coveys, or where I have shot birds that feel light in the hand. Many of the plantations rotate food on the courses they are going to hunt, accomplishing both an additional source of energy and a concentration of birds for the dogs to find. This path of life and death is known as the honey trail. One might argue the morality behind drawing birds to food to better shoot them, but such has been the custom since man baited hooks and hurled spears. On the other hand, if one thinks of sport as carrying certain moral obligation, or the evolution of man’s principles, the ethicality of the honey trail is debatable.
There is no question in my mind that the most valuable work being performed in wildlife management today involves telemetry, a relatively new science, expensive because it requires a substantial investment in man-hours but so diversified in its applications that transmitters have been implanted in species ranging from rattlesnakes to adulterers.
Bobwhite quail have been, and still are, one of the most studied game birds in the world, and now that the logistics of making and attaching transmitters is perfected, the data that are being gathered establish habitat use, feeding patterns, and mortality due to weather, illness, and predation, including the gun. Telemetry is also in the process of disavowing many of the allegations about bobwhite quail we all grew up with.
“There is no such thing as an unproductive point,” says Ted Devoes, an open-faced, sunburned young man working toward his doctorate in game management from Auburn University on a three-year quail project at Pinneland Plantation south of Albany, Georgia. In his first season he outfitted 140 quail with transmitters and banded an additional 350. I hunted Pinneland with its owner, Prosser Mellon, for two days late in the winter of 1993, escorted by a mounted retinue of scientists wearing earphones and carrying radar antennae. Others rode along while musing over biological matters and offering their expertise in all aspects of the piney woods from turkey hunting to stressed-out pine plantations. We hunters went on about the business of hunting as if the entourage weren’t there. Devoes and his assistant had been monitoring quail in four one-thousand-acre tracts for a year, banding birds at night, following specific coveys in every conceivable weather, retrieving the remains of dead birds, and, from the markings and scratches on the plastic-coated transmitters, identifying the varied causes of death. A little like a U.N. delegation, Ted and his helper had monitored every hunt on the assigned tracts since the beginning of the season and knew the whereabouts of every single bobwhite quail. We nimrods didn’t know dick, except when the dogs pointed.
The first afternoon we moved eighteen coveys. An incredible number under any circumstances, made more incredible because this was the final week of the hunting season, and even more surprising because the last time I had shot at Pinneland (two years earlier) the plantation was averaging thirteen coveys a day. I learned that of the three factors that had made a difference, one was achieved through management, one by Prosser Mellon, and one by God. In the first place, the woods had been seriously opened to the sun, twice as many food plots had been sown into the habitat, and the serious figure of two million new bicolor Lespedeza seedlings over ten thousand acres had been planted. Secondly, Prosser Mellon, a quiet man who hides a wry sense of humor behind a somewhat convenient hearing disorder, had finally discouraged his British-born game hog of a stepfather from inviting his murdering cronies by enhancing their daily libations with enough Ex-Lax to make the old boys yearn for the comfort of their men’s club in London. Prosser’s bold administration effectively cut the hunting days on Pinneland by a half. Thirdly, the 1992-1993 breeding season had been graced with the perfect amount of summer rains and an unusual percentage of late hatches. There were birds everywhere, sometimes as many as three coveys in the air at one time.
The year-end statistics demonstrated the following: Fifteen percent of the hens raised two broods, presumably leaving the cock bird with the chore of raising the first hatch to adulthood. This information alone disclaims previous belief that hens only renest if disturbed or after losing eggs of young ones to weather or predation. It appears that on Pinneland, anyway, such is not the case; when during the evening report I suggested that perhaps Mellon raised sexually deviant quail, I was told to shut up.
Bobwhites are territorial and studies on birds outfitted with transmitters the size of fingernails confirm that individual coveys claim specific real estate. Devoes, who is also a bird hunter, advances a somewhat tongue-in-cheek example of the reluctance of quail to fly out of their home range. He theorizes that the covey a hunter flushes and observes making a right-angle turn at the limits of his vision is not attempting an escape maneuver as much as it is trying to remain inside the boundary of its territory, a territory the covey is intimately familiar with, from its gopher holes to its severed treetops.
It was also established that on any given day of the hunting season the Pinneland bird dogs—and these are very good dogs—find 30 percent of the available coveys. Of those coveys pointed but not shot, 41 percent wild-flushed and 59 percent ran. The latter figure is higher than anyone ever dreamed, particularly since it occurred in good piney cover. From that statistic came Ted Devoes’ statement “There is no such thing as an unproductive point.” A good dog points the scent of a covey; what that covey does in terms of running away does not diminish the dog’s original contact.
Prosser and I are pretty quick getting off our horse and honoring a point (he is also an exceptional shot). We walk quickly to either side of the dogs and keep moving until the birds get up. That is as it should be when quail hunting, but twice that afternoon we followed dogs pointing and relocating coveys for hundreds of yards before birds began getting up. It would seem that these princely little American birds have over the years genetically adapted themselves to become the roadrunners of the East.
When we were unsuccessful in flushing a pointed covey and the dogs had been sent off to find a new one, my curiosity would get the better of me and I would ask Devoes where the birds had been. Sometimes he would point to a food patch a quarter of a mile away; other times he would grin and point to a shrub sixty feet from where we had hunted. Ted knew more than the dogs, the handlers, and the shooters. He was a black belt in twenty-first-century electronic wildlife research.
However the main problem with research on these beautiful Southern plantations—telemetric or otherwise—is that these are mollycoddled birds. While a percentage of the data is valid, quail that live on public hunting grounds or on unmanaged private property are not going to enjoy the benefits, health-wise or otherwise, that these blue-blooded birds do, and while most plantation owners are careful not to overshoot a course or shoot down a covey, such is not the case on public hunting grounds. One could argue then that Buckner’s theory on quail losses in early hatches would not hold up if 15 percent of the females raised two broods. But I prefer to believe, until the data prove me wrong, that just as with humans, pampered quail eating the equivalent of caviar for breakfast are going to behave like wealthy women and divorce accordingly.
One of the most extensive studies on poor man’s quail was made on the 150,000-acre base at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where the soil is rank and the hunting pressure heavy. The harvest of bobwhite quail went from approximately 8,000 birds a year in 1970 to 650 in 1985. The seven-year telemetry study indicated the following: A 60 percent raptor-kill in late winter for lack of cover, continuous dispersal of the coveys by hunters, who took an additional 20 percent of the birds, and a mammalian predation rate of 20 percent; quail survival rates averaged 6 percent over four years at Fort Bragg as opposed to 25 percent at Tall Timber Research Station near Tallahassee, where the birds are well cared for. The food plots at Fort Bragg had been planted haphazardly, with little or no escape cover, inviting all sorts of predators, including hunters, to a concentration of targets with nowhere to go. Late-winter hunting had the effect of diminishing the breeding stock, both through direct harvest of birds that had survived the winter as well as by scattering bobwhites at the peak of the accipiter conventions. This study reinforces the feeling that we are no longer dealing with a compensatory harvest—killing birds that would have died anyway—but an additive harvest: a harvest of birds that might otherwise have survived to reproduce, particularly when numbers are down and the cover is poor.
The recommendations that have surfaced from the various telemetry studies being held across the country are: One, that no more than one-third of a covey should be shot, including cripples. Two, that food plots should be located as close to cover as possible. Three, that the hunting season should be shortened (particularly in the South) so that it doesn’t dovetail into a migration of talons. And four, that one should avoid shooting coveys just before dark, as they won’t have time to regroup and will spend a long and vulnerable night pursued by living nightmares shaped like owls and foxes.
Forget the studies made in Texas—unless you are from that state—because management is secondary to rain. Droughts are always destructive to the feathered race, and that applies in the Lone Star State; on the other hand the right amount of rain in southern Texas spells more quail per acre than all the rest of the states added together.
It is theorized, through observation at Fort Bragg, that hawks respond to gunfire in a Pavlovian manner and fly to the sound looking for an easy meal. Telemetry has also proven that about half the hunted bob white quail run for dear life on or about the third time they hear the bells or electronic beepers worn by bird dogs, not to mention the cavalry of horses, mule-pulled wagons, and general jibber-jabber. Poachers have moved silently through the woods for centuries for a reason, and birds hear as well as game wardens, probably better.