The future of both public and private bobwhite quail hunting will one day flow out of aviaries. There isn’t much public land left in the South and where there is, there aren’t enough funds to raise and manage the numbers of wild birds needed to satisfy the thousands of hunters who have nowhere else to hunt. Take it from someone who checks out every deal, reads the daily ads in the local mullet wrapper (newspaper), compares prices on secondhand machinery, and buys the cheapest fertilizer and last year’s seeds: raising wild quail in this final decade of the twentieth century is very expensive. The slightest hiccup in weather, an unscheduled predator fly-in, a pack of wild dogs, or a handful of tabby cats will upset a bobwhite population whose success as a species is dubious to begin with. At best, one hundred eggs will produce fifty chicks, of which twelve will see fall and seven live to breed. Raising wild quail with a less-than-full wallet is not viable in terms of effort versus returns. Even if I manage my eight-hundred-acre farm correctly, the weather is favorable, and I raise thirty coveys a year, all it would take to wipe out that population (or at least push it over the neighbor’s fence) is a friend who can shoot, half a dozen good bird dogs, a death wish, and two weeks’ time. Last season the total bag for the farm was sixty-one bobwhites, fewer than the brothers and I shot in one day.
Simply put, the acreage and management required to build enough coveys to hunt two or three times a week for three and a half months is available only to the wealthiest of hunters. The future of those others who want to work dogs and shoot bobwhites rests in releasing pen-raised birds on small tracts of land, or sinking into the trough of low-rent commercial bird farms—the put-out-in-the-morning, kill-before—lunch, pay-and-move-on slaughterhouses.
For me to criticize this inevitable trend would be presumptuous and insulting, so I won’t, except to suggest that these birds are merely living targets, released in the wild for the sole reason of being shot, and have nothing to do with the intrinsic act of hunting. However, just because I would rather suck my thumb than shoot pen-raised birds doesn’t mean that others less fortunate than I shouldn’t take advantage of what is left of an old tradition.
The practice of releasing bobwhites (chickens: thousands on some plantations) on the ground before the beginning of the hunting season makes for a better flying bird but is considerably more expensive than releasing fewer quail, or even the exact number requested moments before the shooting party takes to the woods. Some of the better pen-raised birds I know are released in early September for a mid-October to mid-March cull. Gillionville Plantation, outside of Albany, Georgia, offers, on its eight thousand acres, hunting from horseback and mule-drawn wagons, lodging in an exquisite antebellum house, and a quality of food and service the most persnickety of sportsmen could wish for. The owner expects that 40 percent of the eight thousand quail (one per acre) put out in August will die in the first two weeks after their release, 20 percent of the remaining stock before the season opens. The birds that survive to sing Christmas carols fly well, well enough to fool most modern hunters into thinking they are shooting wild birds. An assumption to be cherished until the dazzling day they are introduced to the real thing.
The worst-case scenario is the game factory that puts out the quail while the shooter is readying his accoutrement. Birds that once pointed usually have to be booted into flight by the shooter or dog handler; birds that wobble into the first thicket have been known to die of a heart attack on the re-flush. The common denominator in all quail management is money. An afternoon of shooting wobblers on a specific fifty-acre allotment of land, with B. J. Pruit and friends, on a preserve that kills between eighty and one hundred thousand quail a year (!), or a week of living the antebellum life, while not as expensive as raising wild birds, will nevertheless stretch a man’s pocketbook.
The good news is that there are a handful of bird farms in the South that have had the foresight to raise quail in large aviaries. One man raises his birds in a gutted motel with minimal human contact and trained dogs that romp through the bedrooms once a day to acquaint the birds with predation and the usefulness of their wings. These quail are released in the wild at night, in small numbers, next to food and cover. Their survival rate is considerably higher, as is their value as targets, and a small percentage live to mate in the wild.
To those quail hunters who will in the years to come forgo the wilderness experience for a tamer venue and the companionship of their peers, bobwhites, like pheasants, are the answer. Pen-raised birds lend themselves well to the sham of not-so-highly-strung bird dogs, older horses, mules with domino-size teeth, German guns, young whiskey, fast food, and good-natured lies. The only thing really missing from the older scenario is the bird itself: the wild Colinus virginianus, the miniature icon of the American game bird, a little bird with a long history. However, like all shades of ignorance, the real thing won’t be missed by those who don’t know any better. Hunters will momentarily enter a setting totally foreign to their daily lives, a setting that will remind them of their childhood or a book they read, and be absolutely blissful at the opportunity to draw a bead on a small brown bird with abnormally long shinbones. Better yet they will actually kill some, unaware that, like the men who hunt them, the birds fly at a leisurely pace.
One of the most important factors in deciding whether to raise wild or pen-raised bobwhites (or any kind of game bird) is how to deal with predation. Does one go to war against raccoons, skunks, possums, dogs, cats, et al., or does one flow with the natural process, knowing that the added numbers of quail are going to attract an added number of predators?
What is not voiced aloud but is known by everyone in the business is that the most damaging predation to bob-white quail—70 percent—is avian in nature, specifically from the accipiter hawks. At the Tall Timber Research Station the highest quail count goes back to 1973, a year when the hawks were absent, a DDT kind of year. Federally protected, secretive, and quick, the blue darters, as they are called down here, are powered by short, broad wings to better elude the branches of the trees they hunt under. I catch shadowy glimpses of them during their northern migration about the same time the robins show up—which unfortunately for my quail is soon after burning—and again in the fall when the leaves are falling, the cover is stunted, and the understory revealed.
The increase in mammalian predators has been caused in part by the economic and social pressures on trapping. Foxes, raccoons, and the rest of the fur-bearing mammals have exploded back into hungry numbers.
A hundred years ago or even less, the best quail-hunting grounds were found next to small—one- or two-acre—quilts of diversified crops planted by tenants and small farmers. Those tenants ate the opossums, trapped the raccoons and foxes for money, and shot the chicken hawks. The worst-kept secret in quail management these days is that most local plantations and private shooting grounds habitually break the federal laws that protect the birds of prey, and quite honestly they have the most quail. The problem with all this killing for the benefit of one species over another is that it doesn’t make moral sense; when it applies to humans it is considered an abomination. Our continuous meddling has imposed on nature the attitude of a plane whose wings have stalled and entered a spin. Pilots are taught that when everything fails, release the controls and the plane will right itself; it will right itself because it is designed to right itself, and inherently wants to do so. So does nature. This year, the accipiters ate me out of house and home in terms of quail. To a hawk I am a cheap supplier of fine foods. This year the Cooper’s hawks came and went with the robins, and I would not trade either for a quail.