July 7, 2025 • 27 mins
On this episode of Backwoods University we’ll delve into the future of bobwhite quail and their potential as a species. We will hear from quail hunter and landowner, Jimmy Bryan, as he walks us through restoring quail on his family land. Quail Biologist, Dr. James Martin walks us through the many things people can practically do to help quail and help keep them around. Everything from land management practices, such as prescribed burning and timber management, to getting involved with conservation organizations like Quail Forever, we cover it all.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. I'm your host Lake Pickle. On this episode,
I want to tell you about the future of Bob
white quail, what they need from the land to be
able to persist as a species, and more importantly, what
(00:23):
they need from us. It's late winter and me and
my good friend Jordan Blissit are taking advantage of this
good crisp weather to go and light some woods on fire,
which is an aggressive way of saying we're going to
create some quail habitat. Is this first time you've been
able to burn in February?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Barn Tan Akers about two three weeks ago, and Isaiah,
the weather's been wonky. Place needs a fire for the
whole place for the most part.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Now you may be sitting there scratching your head, asking yourself,
did he just say they're going to go set some
woods on fire on purpose? So let me give you
a fun task to complete. Go to Google and search
nicknames for Bob white quail, and I will bet you
one of the first names to pop up will be Firebird,
and that nickname wasn't just given. It was earned, earned
(01:17):
because Bob Whites evolved to live in habitats maintained by
frequent low intensity fire.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
We're gonna start with the back and fire pretty much
run it all the way down through there to give
us extra barrier, and then we can set a head
to run down this way.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So if we went with a drip torch dripping fire,
we set a blaze to the thirty five acre block
and stayed with it until we were sure that it
had burned completely through and was safely contained. This process
is called a prescribed fire or a prescribed burn. And
this is important because let's think about what we learned
on the last episode. We learned that we used to
have a huge population of Bob White quail and the
(02:02):
many reasons why we almost wiped them out completely. The
bird that just won't give up. Remember, they're still hanging
around here, and I don't know about you, but I
would like to make sure that they hang around. And
this episode is all about that. The future of Bob
White's and the things that we can do to make
sure that we never lose them, or the hunting culture altogether.
(02:30):
I think if we're gonna have an authentic discussion about
the future of Bob Whitequail. Then we need to talk
to folks who are actively making a.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Future for Bob White Quail.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
To kick us off on this episode, it's time for
y'all to meet someone special. His name is mister Jimmy
Bryan and he's from West Point, Mississippi. Mister Jimmy saw
the glory days and fall of Bob White first hand.
I find this perspective to be very valuable. He also
has walked through the process of taking a piece of
land that was almost wiped of quail and quail habitat
(03:01):
completely and restored it. And not just any piece of land,
but his family land, land that he grew up hunting on,
and land that means something to him. Here is mister Jimmy.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
If you look at how we farmed when I was
a kid, he had a lot of small farmers. Well
have any small farmers left out here? Three or four
people on all the land. Everybody had a garden. You
had two row four old planners, so you had small
fields hedgerows around them. You had tenants in that garden
and just a natural habitat for quail. We didn't do
anything delivered for quail. God just gave him to us.
(03:38):
They took advantage of the you know, drain. I was
in high school and maybe proud of that. It seemed
like half of the folks in West Fort had dog
boxes and pickup trucks and dred to three times a week.
But I noticed after a year two folks talked about
not as many birds, and in the seventies they said,
you know, we weren't have many birds anymore. By the eighties,
(03:58):
nobody had a bird dogs. When I started back hunting,
I don't found out I didn't have any birds that
a wagon. Then we might ride the wagon for uh
three hours to find two covers of books, kill two
or three birds, but it was just worth it.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Clearly, you don't have to hear much from mister Jimmy
to figure out quail hunting means a lot to him.
But I now want to know how he started the
process of restoring quail on his property. FYI, you're gonna
hear him mention someone named doctor Wes Berger. Doctor Berger
serves as the dean of the College of Forest Resources
at Mississippi State University and is also a wildlife biologist
(04:38):
with an extensive background working with Bob Whites.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
I decided I needed to do something. So I called
doctor Westburger one day and it was probably twenty five
years ago, and I said, doctor Burger, I want to
know what I need to do to bring quail back
to this product. He said, how many covies do you
know on this place? That's just one third or two
on to take a block. And I said, well, wes's
three or four with it, I know. He said, well,
we can populate this place if you do what I say.
(05:03):
We spent the whole day I got there. I said, well, Wes,
you're telling me I need to take it back to
what it was in the fifties. He said, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Take the property back to what it was in the
nineteen fifties and the quail will return. I guess that
shouldn't be too surprising after learning what started to happen
in the country in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies,
but I want to know the details of it. What
did he actually do?
Speaker 4 (05:30):
Then I started flatting the Little Lady grass and then
West started doing research over here on this CP thirty
three program planting buffers around greenfields. We signed up everything
would fit the program that had to be farmed for
the last three years, so had fitz rose around it.
They were growing up hedges, so I decided just cryptotops out,
make hedgerows. Put this grass buff out there. The until
(05:53):
I started seeing all kinds of birds, not quail, I
see redbirds, just the all kind of birds I've never
seen out here before. Then we started quail. I still
wasn't happy because I couldn't go out and find ten
covies of birds, and but well, I said, just be patient.
But the next year our numbers went up and he
started doing these covey counts, and at one point he
said we had over the whole place sixty seventy covees.
(06:15):
To take a document and he said, we can extrapolate
that into one hundred covies. I said, well, I'm not
going to believe it till I see it. And I
never didn't see it. But I did see a lot
more birds. A lot of them were just covered the
four five. But we did have what was the huntable population.
So I've been well pleased that. You know, I won't
live long enough to do all the things I want
to do. But if you don't have something, you want
(06:37):
to do. Why do you need to be here?
Speaker 3 (06:38):
You know? That's why I feel that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah, mister Jimmy's story about his land is one that
I can't help but be drawn to. He saw a
place that meant a lot to him become void of
something he was passionate about, and it spurred him to
take action and do something about it. And that attitude alone,
(07:01):
I think is key for creating a future for Bob
White Quail. There's also one detail about Jimmy Bryant's story
that I've left out until now. His property, the one
that we've been talking about, is a place called Prairie Wildlife.
I've been out there myself and I've seen it with
my own eyes, and trust me, the work that they've
put into it is evident. But even more importantly, it
(07:22):
has become one of the biggest quail and wildlife research
centers in the Southeast.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
I told Wes when yes, I said, I'm a name
miss Life as North because the more trucks Missigan State
Truck's here in the whole camp. But they've done every
kind of research in the world. Yeah, you know, quail, rats, butterflies,
had folks from all over the world working for them.
They told me what is It's the best research they
ever got. It didn't cost me anything of them do this.
(07:49):
That's the reciprocal arrangement, you know. I get helped him
and they help me. But they've done all kinds of
research and been great partners.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
It's a pretty incredible story. If you remember hearing from
doctor Martin McConnell in the last episode Pray Wildlife is
where he conducts a lot of research. And while we're
on the subject of research and biologist, let's switch gears.
We've heard about the future of Bob White from the
perspective of a hunter and a landowner, but now I
want to hear about it from a biologist. Doctor James
(08:18):
Martin is one of the most published and renowned quail
biologist in the entire country. When I was tracking down
someone to talk to for this episode, the sentiment that
I got from pretty much everyone I talked to is
that James is kind of the guy when it comes
to Bob White, quail biology and research. So I couldn't
think of anyone better to talk to about the future
of Bob White quail than James. He also wrote an
(08:40):
article recently for Quail Forever titled Passion an Essential Ingredient
for Bob White Quail Management. I want to read you
an excerpt from this article because this is the first
thing that I asked him about. It goes like this.
A successful quail manager possesses numerous character traits such as knowledge, creativity,
in patience, a couple those with financial resources, a land base,
(09:04):
and in time the dream of waving your hat when
old Sam goes on point can become a reality. But
having a deep rooted passion might be the glue that
holds it all together. I read this entire article that
you wrote about passion and essential Ingredient for Bob White Management.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Why do you think that is That's a great question.
Speaker 5 (09:26):
I think we can louve passion and love together, and
those two things you have to have it. It's an
expression of value or the value that we put towards
the species, the habitat they in habit, and the people
that create that habitat, the dogs that are used to
(09:48):
find those birds, and the hunter that goes out there
with those dogs to find those birds. All that love
and passion is how we're going to sustain the populations
we have and potentially increase the populations we have.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I think without people.
Speaker 5 (10:07):
Falling in love with the bird, the dog, the habitat,
or the landscape, we're not going to be successful.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Passion and love for the bird and its habitat are
essential to creating a future for bob white quail. And
that's not coming from me, that's coming from one of
the best quail biologists in the country. Keep this at
the top of mind, because later on we're going to
get more into the weeds of actual habitat. No pun intended,
but it all means nothing if we don't have passion
in love. I'm curious about what doctor Martin thinks is
(10:38):
the best way to generate this passion, or if that's
even possible.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
We have to continually provide folks an opportunity to hear them,
to see them, to see a dog that is hunting
cover and finding the birds and interacting with the birds.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
And then you know, occasionally we get the harvest one.
Speaker 5 (11:00):
But that's really so far down the list of what
we value as bird hunters and as bird conservationists. But
it's really about all those things together. It's kind of
like a triad. To me, the bird, the dog, the person.
All those things together is what it's going to take
and to establish a foundation so we can go forward.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
One of the things that Mark McConnell brought up, and
interestingly enough, I've heard Steve Vanella say this same sort
of thing when talking about bison. So different species but
kind of a parallel challenge is Mark had an incident
where he had some friends of his had a property
in Oklahoma. They were telling Mark about they were constantly
flushing coveys of quail as they were headed to their
(11:41):
deer sand and Mark was like, oh man, that's that's awesome.
You're going to go in there and go hunt them?
And they were like, you know, I guess we could.
I hadn't hadn't really thought about that, and I'd receive
when talked about bison, you know, knowe like that you
see a bison run across the road, you go, oh cool.
You know, It's not like if if I'm driving down
(12:01):
the highway and I see a strutting turkey out in
the field, where does my head go immediately? You know,
I always draw a parallel back to spring turkeys. Because
that was like the catalyst for kind of all of this.
It all started for a love for spring turkey on
I think about the spring woods, I think about here
in a turkey gobble, and I think about the passion
that I grew for that particular animal and the habitat
(12:21):
and the pursuit so much that I don't necessarily have
to go to what's the state I've never hunted before, Oregon.
I would like to go hunt turkeys in Oregon. But
I don't have to go hunt turkeys in Oregon to
appreciate that turkeys are up there doing their thing right.
But I wonder if I had never found that spark,
(12:42):
I wouldn't know to care about turkeys in Oregon. There
are some people they'd see a covey of quail and
they'll go, oh, that's cool. But connecting that to something
that they could hunt and pursue in a resource that
they could enjoy, some of that's been lost.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
If you're of the generation I'm forty three I called
the tail end of bird hunting in the traditional sense,
you were born mid eighties or later, your grandparents and
your father or mother were unlikely to bird hunt, and
so that's probably where the disconnection happened. If you're a
(13:19):
younger millennial and younger, then you've probably not been exposed
to it. And then we're just a different society as well.
I mean, even if you set aside quel population decline
and the decline of quell hunting, there's no doubt we've changed.
You know, there's been books written about the disconnection of
(13:42):
the child in the woods. There's just a lot more
distractions now. So even if you were lucky to have
someone in your circle that hunted or bird hunting, and
if you were close enough to huntable populations, there was
just a lot of other distractions to take you away
from that potential opportunity. And then we've also disconnected people
(14:04):
from the land. In the respect of the number of
people that grew up working on a farm or even
working in the woods in some way declined as well.
We've disconnected ourselves from our food supply, from the production
of fiber and whatnot for the most part. I mean,
obviously there's people while they're still doing that, but if
(14:25):
you're not interacting with the environment on a daily basis
as part of your job or as part of your
way of life, you also lose it in that way too.
It's really hard for us to appreciate things we never see.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Or never hear.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
It sounds to me that the idea of generating passion
is not an easy task, but not impossible. I now
want to shift the conversation a bit and begin to
dive in with doctor Martin on what Bob White Quill
actually needs to be able to persist and thrive on
(15:01):
a landscape. If someone said, Lake, I want you to
put episode one on how we used to have a
lot of quail and then we didn't. I want you
to put it in one sentence, and I'll give you
my one sentence, and you tell me if you think
I'm off base or not. The sentence I would say,
we lost Bob White Quail because we lost Bob White Quail.
(15:22):
Habitat correct, and so moving forward, and when I'm learning
talking about the future of Bob Whites, I would say,
if we're going to have a future, a positive future for.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Bob White Quail, then we got to have Bob white coil.
Speaker 5 (15:36):
Habitat certainly, I mean that shouldn't be controversial. It's frankly
a fundamental law. By definition, habitat is the resources and
conditions that are necessary for the occurpacy and the survival
of a particular organism. So by definition, if you don't,
(16:00):
I won't have habitat. You can't have this organism. It's
really like the law of gravity for the I mean,
and maybe even stronger than that. Habitat is essential because
by definition, without it, you can't have the organism.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Okay, So now we officially have essential item number two
to add to our list of things we need to
create a positive future for Bob white quail, number one
being passionate love for the bird and number two being habitat.
Habitat is non negotiable. Think about it, almost like trying
to build a house without a foundation. You would not
(16:35):
get very far, and even if you did, that house
would crumble and fall at the first bit of adversity.
A house needs a foundation, and a quail needs habitat.
So now that we know the importance of habitat, I
think it's equally important that we learn what good quality
habitat for Bob White quail actually is.
Speaker 5 (16:56):
Just to keep it simple, we'll break it down the
four parts. I'll need four basic things. They need shrub cover. Okay,
And we're a little loose with our language and the
conservation world about calling quail a grass and bird. And
I guess folks a little bit of a false impression
of what quail are. They're either a facultative grass and
(17:17):
bird or a shrub obligate bird. Both of those things
mean that they need some shrubs, and they also need
some grass. Okay, but the shrub is super important because
that's going to provide escape cover from hawks, thermal cover
during cold events, is going to provide thermal cover doing
very hot events weather events, and if you're out in
(17:38):
South Texas, that shrub cover is really important from a
shape perspective. And then some shrubs obviously provide food as well.
So what I mean by shrubs is pretty much any
kind of woody vegetation that is below say, your shoulders
and about the size of an old Volkswagen. And then
you need forbes. To a lot of people, that would
be just the weeds. That would be things like ragweed
(18:01):
and partures pea and wooly croton and things like that.
And what those plants provide are food via seed. So
an additional plot of providing seeds, they're gonna provide substraight
for insects.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Next, we need some grass cover.
Speaker 5 (18:17):
That grass cover needs to be in the form of
bunches so that.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
It's not forming a mate.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
So those species that form mats are like permuta grass,
the hay grass. So we want those bunch forming grasses
like big blue stem, little blue stem, what have you,
but we don't want a ton of it. And then
the last thing is bareground.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Unlike a lot of.
Speaker 5 (18:39):
Other galliforms quail or weak scratching birds, you, as a
turkey hunter, know that if you go in the wood
and you see a lot of leaves peeled back and
a lot of bare ground showing that probably a flock
of turkeys has come to there.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
You're not gonna see that with quail.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
And so they need that bare ground to have access
to those seas that are following from those.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Four All right, now we're getting somewhere. I hope y'all
are writing this down, because this is some good information,
good Bob White. Quail habitat consists of four things. Number
one shrub cover, number two forbes or weeds as most
folks call them, Number three grass cover, and number four
bare ground. So we have the key ingredients. But just
(19:24):
like having all the materials to build a house doesn't
magically turn those materials into a house. It's got to
be built. We now have to learn what to do
with these ingredients of quail habitat.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
So those four things need to be present in close
proximity to each other. So if we were to go
out anywhere and throw a baseball or saw ball in
into direction and wherever that ball land, we should be
close within feet of each one of those components. Imagine
yourself in a wide open landscape and you're in a spot,
(19:59):
and then you throw one hundred baseballs. If you do
that across a thousand different spots across a county, if
more times than not those baseballs are landing in this
quail cover, then we're gonna have quail. If we do
that and we're only hit and cover quail cover on
a few of those spots, we're not going to have quail.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
You can't just have it in one spot. You had
to have it in a lot of spots, and the.
Speaker 5 (20:23):
Cumulative effect of all that vegetation together is habitat for quail.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
That example really helps tie back to something that we
hit on pretty hard in episode one. We talked about
simplified landscape. I feel like every time I hear the
word monoculture, it's tied to a negative association to an
effect on wildlife.
Speaker 5 (20:43):
That is the opposite of what we want to do.
For most wildlife species. We want to have a diverse
plant community with a timing of sea production and fruit
production that is spread across the entire year. So those
two things are at oddsite with each other. Be very
hard if farmers had to go out there and harvest corn,
(21:05):
for example, if all the ears were ripe on different
days in different weeks. Right, But from a quail perspective,
we need plants that are going to produce food in June, July, August, September,
et cetera. And so the plant community needs to be
diverse enough that is producing food twelve months out of
the year and cover twelve months out of the year
and thermal cover twelve months out of the year. Monotypic
(21:27):
plant communities can't do that. The question then becomes how
do we get it? How do we create those resources
and conditions. If we could wave a magic wand that
would be great, but that's just not going to happen.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
That is the million covey question. We understand what we need,
but how do we go about getting it? What are
the chances of us getting in. Maybe it's hoping for
more landowners like Jimmy Bryan and Wilbert Primos to come
along and willingly put forth the effort and resources to
put quel habitat and quail back on their property. Maybe
(22:03):
it's conservation organizations like Quail Forever, who's done great work
over the last twenty years spreading the story of quail
and improving habitat on literally millions of acres. Maybe it's
government incentive programs to aid landowners. Maybe it's a combination
of all of it. Here's one thing I do know,
A guy like doctor James Martin doesn't get the reputation
he has without going through the trenches. He told me
(22:25):
he's been focused almost exclusively on quail for over twenty years.
That's twenty plus years of field work, research, working with landowners,
and gaining a whole lot of perspective. In the research
and conversations I had leading up to this episode, I
heard Bob White quail hunters referred to as hopeless romantics
and dreamers. But I want to know where James's attitude
(22:47):
has been from when he started quail work up until now.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
I would say it's a roller coaster with a positive trend.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
It's one of those coasters that.
Speaker 5 (23:01):
We haven't looked back around to the end yet, but
we're still on the upper trajectory. There's highs and lows,
for sure. I've seen several cycles now of various emphasis
put on quail by state agencies and federal government, and
so you ride those highs and waves of the availability
of financial resources. But the constant, and I wouldn't have
(23:25):
said this maybe twenty years ago, but the constant is
the hunting aspect.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
The constant motivating.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
Factor is there's still people out there really enjoy running
dogs on quail. And again not necessarily the harvest part,
but that part is always kind of the juice and
the roller coaster, and it keeps us going, and it
keeps state agencies going.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
We're still heading in the right direction.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
I think it does no good to be negative, right,
I mean, it's we are we face the realities we
know constraint, but we also know in this paper is
not published yet, but they're conservatively over six million quail
still in the United States, which is, you know, it
(24:13):
doesn't compare to probably the tens of millions that we're
here in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
But let's just move on past that.
Speaker 5 (24:20):
You know, this is what we have now, and then
there's plenty to work with. We're fortunate in this country
where we still have a lot of land. I've worked
in other countries where every stitch of it is used
for some type of production agriculture, or at least very
little of it it's available for wildlock conservation.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
We still have a lot of land available to us.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
We still have a culture that's in existence, that is
on life support, but it is in existence about hunting quail,
and so those ingredients we can build up ponds, and
so we always got to keep that in forefront of
our mind.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Okay, let's do a quick recap before we go into
the grand finale. We learn what the process was like
for a landowner to take a property void of Bob
white quail in their habitat and restore it. We learned
that an absolute essential ingredient for a positive future for
Bob white quail is passion. We learned in greater detail
what Bob white quail habitat actually is, and that having
(25:21):
that habatat on the landscape is non negotiable if we
want to have quail. And we learned that the general
attitude towards Bob white Quail persistence over the past two
decades has been a roller coaster with an overall positive trajectory.
My friends, we have danced all around the subject of
what the future of Bob white Quail is. But the
(25:41):
time for dancing is over, and now I'm going to
be direct. I'm going to ask doctor James Martin what
he believes the future of Bob white Quail is.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
What is the future Bob white Quail? Well, I can
tell you this. I would not have exposed my children,
and I'm gonna get emotional talk about this. I would
not have exposed my children to bird dolls and bird
hunting if I knew it was a dead end. I
know the passion that I have for it, and I
(26:15):
couldn't imagine dangling that carrot and that love in front
of them knowing that it might go away. That only
leads to a broken heart. Being a father will change
you instantly. It will make you never to want to
break your children's heart.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
I think any parent has that. So I thought about it.
Speaker 5 (26:40):
I mean I had a conscious conversation with myself, like
it was internal, you know, but it was conscious about
if you take him you can't take it from him.
It's like you would never expose your kids to baseball
if you knew the game was not going to exist
in ten years. So the best hope I can give you,
(27:01):
or the best display of my hope, is that I've
taken my ten year old son, Bertha.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
I want to thank all of you for listening to
Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this Country Life,
and I want to give a big shout out to
Onyx Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you like
this episode, share it with a friend, and make sure
you come back for the next one. Because if this
podcast was a quail hunt and we've only flushed two
covees so far and the dog's already back on point,
we're just getting started. We'll see y'all next time.
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. I'm your host Lake Pickle. On this episode,
I want to tell you about the future of Bob
white quail, what they need from the land to be
able to persist as a species, and more importantly, what
(00:23):
they need from us. It's late winter and me and
my good friend Jordan Blissit are taking advantage of this
good crisp weather to go and light some woods on fire,
which is an aggressive way of saying we're going to
create some quail habitat. Is this first time you've been
able to burn in February?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Barn Tan Akers about two three weeks ago, and Isaiah,
the weather's been wonky. Place needs a fire for the
whole place for the most part.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Now you may be sitting there scratching your head, asking yourself,
did he just say they're going to go set some
woods on fire on purpose? So let me give you
a fun task to complete. Go to Google and search
nicknames for Bob white quail, and I will bet you
one of the first names to pop up will be Firebird,
and that nickname wasn't just given. It was earned, earned
(01:17):
because Bob Whites evolved to live in habitats maintained by
frequent low intensity fire.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
We're gonna start with the back and fire pretty much
run it all the way down through there to give
us extra barrier, and then we can set a head
to run down this way.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So if we went with a drip torch dripping fire,
we set a blaze to the thirty five acre block
and stayed with it until we were sure that it
had burned completely through and was safely contained. This process
is called a prescribed fire or a prescribed burn. And
this is important because let's think about what we learned
on the last episode. We learned that we used to
have a huge population of Bob White quail and the
(02:02):
many reasons why we almost wiped them out completely. The
bird that just won't give up. Remember, they're still hanging
around here, and I don't know about you, but I
would like to make sure that they hang around. And
this episode is all about that. The future of Bob
White's and the things that we can do to make
sure that we never lose them, or the hunting culture altogether.
(02:30):
I think if we're gonna have an authentic discussion about
the future of Bob Whitequail. Then we need to talk
to folks who are actively making a.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Future for Bob White Quail.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
To kick us off on this episode, it's time for
y'all to meet someone special. His name is mister Jimmy
Bryan and he's from West Point, Mississippi. Mister Jimmy saw
the glory days and fall of Bob White first hand.
I find this perspective to be very valuable. He also
has walked through the process of taking a piece of
land that was almost wiped of quail and quail habitat
(03:01):
completely and restored it. And not just any piece of land,
but his family land, land that he grew up hunting on,
and land that means something to him. Here is mister Jimmy.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
If you look at how we farmed when I was
a kid, he had a lot of small farmers. Well
have any small farmers left out here? Three or four
people on all the land. Everybody had a garden. You
had two row four old planners, so you had small
fields hedgerows around them. You had tenants in that garden
and just a natural habitat for quail. We didn't do
anything delivered for quail. God just gave him to us.
(03:38):
They took advantage of the you know, drain. I was
in high school and maybe proud of that. It seemed
like half of the folks in West Fort had dog
boxes and pickup trucks and dred to three times a week.
But I noticed after a year two folks talked about
not as many birds, and in the seventies they said,
you know, we weren't have many birds anymore. By the eighties,
(03:58):
nobody had a bird dogs. When I started back hunting,
I don't found out I didn't have any birds that
a wagon. Then we might ride the wagon for uh
three hours to find two covers of books, kill two
or three birds, but it was just worth it.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Clearly, you don't have to hear much from mister Jimmy
to figure out quail hunting means a lot to him.
But I now want to know how he started the
process of restoring quail on his property. FYI, you're gonna
hear him mention someone named doctor Wes Berger. Doctor Berger
serves as the dean of the College of Forest Resources
at Mississippi State University and is also a wildlife biologist
(04:38):
with an extensive background working with Bob Whites.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
I decided I needed to do something. So I called
doctor Westburger one day and it was probably twenty five
years ago, and I said, doctor Burger, I want to
know what I need to do to bring quail back
to this product. He said, how many covies do you
know on this place? That's just one third or two
on to take a block. And I said, well, wes's
three or four with it, I know. He said, well,
we can populate this place if you do what I say.
(05:03):
We spent the whole day I got there. I said, well, Wes,
you're telling me I need to take it back to
what it was in the fifties. He said, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Take the property back to what it was in the
nineteen fifties and the quail will return. I guess that
shouldn't be too surprising after learning what started to happen
in the country in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies,
but I want to know the details of it. What
did he actually do?
Speaker 4 (05:30):
Then I started flatting the Little Lady grass and then
West started doing research over here on this CP thirty
three program planting buffers around greenfields. We signed up everything
would fit the program that had to be farmed for
the last three years, so had fitz rose around it.
They were growing up hedges, so I decided just cryptotops out,
make hedgerows. Put this grass buff out there. The until
(05:53):
I started seeing all kinds of birds, not quail, I
see redbirds, just the all kind of birds I've never
seen out here before. Then we started quail. I still
wasn't happy because I couldn't go out and find ten
covies of birds, and but well, I said, just be patient.
But the next year our numbers went up and he
started doing these covey counts, and at one point he
said we had over the whole place sixty seventy covees.
(06:15):
To take a document and he said, we can extrapolate
that into one hundred covies. I said, well, I'm not
going to believe it till I see it. And I
never didn't see it. But I did see a lot
more birds. A lot of them were just covered the
four five. But we did have what was the huntable population.
So I've been well pleased that. You know, I won't
live long enough to do all the things I want
to do. But if you don't have something, you want
(06:37):
to do. Why do you need to be here?
Speaker 3 (06:38):
You know? That's why I feel that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah, mister Jimmy's story about his land is one that
I can't help but be drawn to. He saw a
place that meant a lot to him become void of
something he was passionate about, and it spurred him to
take action and do something about it. And that attitude alone,
(07:01):
I think is key for creating a future for Bob
White Quail. There's also one detail about Jimmy Bryant's story
that I've left out until now. His property, the one
that we've been talking about, is a place called Prairie Wildlife.
I've been out there myself and I've seen it with
my own eyes, and trust me, the work that they've
put into it is evident. But even more importantly, it
(07:22):
has become one of the biggest quail and wildlife research
centers in the Southeast.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
I told Wes when yes, I said, I'm a name
miss Life as North because the more trucks Missigan State
Truck's here in the whole camp. But they've done every
kind of research in the world. Yeah, you know, quail, rats, butterflies,
had folks from all over the world working for them.
They told me what is It's the best research they
ever got. It didn't cost me anything of them do this.
(07:49):
That's the reciprocal arrangement, you know. I get helped him
and they help me. But they've done all kinds of
research and been great partners.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
It's a pretty incredible story. If you remember hearing from
doctor Martin McConnell in the last episode Pray Wildlife is
where he conducts a lot of research. And while we're
on the subject of research and biologist, let's switch gears.
We've heard about the future of Bob White from the
perspective of a hunter and a landowner, but now I
want to hear about it from a biologist. Doctor James
(08:18):
Martin is one of the most published and renowned quail
biologist in the entire country. When I was tracking down
someone to talk to for this episode, the sentiment that
I got from pretty much everyone I talked to is
that James is kind of the guy when it comes
to Bob White, quail biology and research. So I couldn't
think of anyone better to talk to about the future
of Bob White quail than James. He also wrote an
(08:40):
article recently for Quail Forever titled Passion an Essential Ingredient
for Bob White Quail Management. I want to read you
an excerpt from this article because this is the first
thing that I asked him about. It goes like this.
A successful quail manager possesses numerous character traits such as knowledge, creativity,
in patience, a couple those with financial resources, a land base,
(09:04):
and in time the dream of waving your hat when
old Sam goes on point can become a reality. But
having a deep rooted passion might be the glue that
holds it all together. I read this entire article that
you wrote about passion and essential Ingredient for Bob White Management.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Why do you think that is That's a great question.
Speaker 5 (09:26):
I think we can louve passion and love together, and
those two things you have to have it. It's an
expression of value or the value that we put towards
the species, the habitat they in habit, and the people
that create that habitat, the dogs that are used to
(09:48):
find those birds, and the hunter that goes out there
with those dogs to find those birds. All that love
and passion is how we're going to sustain the populations
we have and potentially increase the populations we have.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I think without people.
Speaker 5 (10:07):
Falling in love with the bird, the dog, the habitat,
or the landscape, we're not going to be successful.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Passion and love for the bird and its habitat are
essential to creating a future for bob white quail. And
that's not coming from me, that's coming from one of
the best quail biologists in the country. Keep this at
the top of mind, because later on we're going to
get more into the weeds of actual habitat. No pun intended,
but it all means nothing if we don't have passion
in love. I'm curious about what doctor Martin thinks is
(10:38):
the best way to generate this passion, or if that's
even possible.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
We have to continually provide folks an opportunity to hear them,
to see them, to see a dog that is hunting
cover and finding the birds and interacting with the birds.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
And then you know, occasionally we get the harvest one.
Speaker 5 (11:00):
But that's really so far down the list of what
we value as bird hunters and as bird conservationists. But
it's really about all those things together. It's kind of
like a triad. To me, the bird, the dog, the person.
All those things together is what it's going to take
and to establish a foundation so we can go forward.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
One of the things that Mark McConnell brought up, and
interestingly enough, I've heard Steve Vanella say this same sort
of thing when talking about bison. So different species but
kind of a parallel challenge is Mark had an incident
where he had some friends of his had a property
in Oklahoma. They were telling Mark about they were constantly
flushing coveys of quail as they were headed to their
(11:41):
deer sand and Mark was like, oh man, that's that's awesome.
You're going to go in there and go hunt them?
And they were like, you know, I guess we could.
I hadn't hadn't really thought about that, and I'd receive
when talked about bison, you know, knowe like that you
see a bison run across the road, you go, oh cool.
You know, It's not like if if I'm driving down
(12:01):
the highway and I see a strutting turkey out in
the field, where does my head go immediately? You know,
I always draw a parallel back to spring turkeys. Because
that was like the catalyst for kind of all of this.
It all started for a love for spring turkey on
I think about the spring woods, I think about here
in a turkey gobble, and I think about the passion
that I grew for that particular animal and the habitat
(12:21):
and the pursuit so much that I don't necessarily have
to go to what's the state I've never hunted before, Oregon.
I would like to go hunt turkeys in Oregon. But
I don't have to go hunt turkeys in Oregon to
appreciate that turkeys are up there doing their thing right.
But I wonder if I had never found that spark,
(12:42):
I wouldn't know to care about turkeys in Oregon. There
are some people they'd see a covey of quail and
they'll go, oh, that's cool. But connecting that to something
that they could hunt and pursue in a resource that
they could enjoy, some of that's been lost.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
If you're of the generation I'm forty three I called
the tail end of bird hunting in the traditional sense,
you were born mid eighties or later, your grandparents and
your father or mother were unlikely to bird hunt, and
so that's probably where the disconnection happened. If you're a
(13:19):
younger millennial and younger, then you've probably not been exposed
to it. And then we're just a different society as well.
I mean, even if you set aside quel population decline
and the decline of quell hunting, there's no doubt we've changed.
You know, there's been books written about the disconnection of
(13:42):
the child in the woods. There's just a lot more
distractions now. So even if you were lucky to have
someone in your circle that hunted or bird hunting, and
if you were close enough to huntable populations, there was
just a lot of other distractions to take you away
from that potential opportunity. And then we've also disconnected people
(14:04):
from the land. In the respect of the number of
people that grew up working on a farm or even
working in the woods in some way declined as well.
We've disconnected ourselves from our food supply, from the production
of fiber and whatnot for the most part. I mean,
obviously there's people while they're still doing that, but if
(14:25):
you're not interacting with the environment on a daily basis
as part of your job or as part of your
way of life, you also lose it in that way too.
It's really hard for us to appreciate things we never see.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Or never hear.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
It sounds to me that the idea of generating passion
is not an easy task, but not impossible. I now
want to shift the conversation a bit and begin to
dive in with doctor Martin on what Bob White Quill
actually needs to be able to persist and thrive on
(15:01):
a landscape. If someone said, Lake, I want you to
put episode one on how we used to have a
lot of quail and then we didn't. I want you
to put it in one sentence, and I'll give you
my one sentence, and you tell me if you think
I'm off base or not. The sentence I would say,
we lost Bob White Quail because we lost Bob White Quail.
(15:22):
Habitat correct, and so moving forward, and when I'm learning
talking about the future of Bob Whites, I would say,
if we're going to have a future, a positive future for.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Bob White Quail, then we got to have Bob white coil.
Speaker 5 (15:36):
Habitat certainly, I mean that shouldn't be controversial. It's frankly
a fundamental law. By definition, habitat is the resources and
conditions that are necessary for the occurpacy and the survival
of a particular organism. So by definition, if you don't,
(16:00):
I won't have habitat. You can't have this organism. It's
really like the law of gravity for the I mean,
and maybe even stronger than that. Habitat is essential because
by definition, without it, you can't have the organism.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Okay, So now we officially have essential item number two
to add to our list of things we need to
create a positive future for Bob white quail, number one
being passionate love for the bird and number two being habitat.
Habitat is non negotiable. Think about it, almost like trying
to build a house without a foundation. You would not
(16:35):
get very far, and even if you did, that house
would crumble and fall at the first bit of adversity.
A house needs a foundation, and a quail needs habitat.
So now that we know the importance of habitat, I
think it's equally important that we learn what good quality
habitat for Bob White quail actually is.
Speaker 5 (16:56):
Just to keep it simple, we'll break it down the
four parts. I'll need four basic things. They need shrub cover. Okay,
And we're a little loose with our language and the
conservation world about calling quail a grass and bird. And
I guess folks a little bit of a false impression
of what quail are. They're either a facultative grass and
(17:17):
bird or a shrub obligate bird. Both of those things
mean that they need some shrubs, and they also need
some grass. Okay, but the shrub is super important because
that's going to provide escape cover from hawks, thermal cover
during cold events, is going to provide thermal cover doing
very hot events weather events, and if you're out in
(17:38):
South Texas, that shrub cover is really important from a
shape perspective. And then some shrubs obviously provide food as well.
So what I mean by shrubs is pretty much any
kind of woody vegetation that is below say, your shoulders
and about the size of an old Volkswagen. And then
you need forbes. To a lot of people, that would
be just the weeds. That would be things like ragweed
(18:01):
and partures pea and wooly croton and things like that.
And what those plants provide are food via seed. So
an additional plot of providing seeds, they're gonna provide substraight
for insects.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Next, we need some grass cover.
Speaker 5 (18:17):
That grass cover needs to be in the form of
bunches so that.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
It's not forming a mate.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
So those species that form mats are like permuta grass,
the hay grass. So we want those bunch forming grasses
like big blue stem, little blue stem, what have you,
but we don't want a ton of it. And then
the last thing is bareground.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Unlike a lot of.
Speaker 5 (18:39):
Other galliforms quail or weak scratching birds, you, as a
turkey hunter, know that if you go in the wood
and you see a lot of leaves peeled back and
a lot of bare ground showing that probably a flock
of turkeys has come to there.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
You're not gonna see that with quail.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
And so they need that bare ground to have access
to those seas that are following from those.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Four All right, now we're getting somewhere. I hope y'all
are writing this down, because this is some good information,
good Bob White. Quail habitat consists of four things. Number
one shrub cover, number two forbes or weeds as most
folks call them, Number three grass cover, and number four
bare ground. So we have the key ingredients. But just
(19:24):
like having all the materials to build a house doesn't
magically turn those materials into a house. It's got to
be built. We now have to learn what to do
with these ingredients of quail habitat.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
So those four things need to be present in close
proximity to each other. So if we were to go
out anywhere and throw a baseball or saw ball in
into direction and wherever that ball land, we should be
close within feet of each one of those components. Imagine
yourself in a wide open landscape and you're in a spot,
(19:59):
and then you throw one hundred baseballs. If you do
that across a thousand different spots across a county, if
more times than not those baseballs are landing in this
quail cover, then we're gonna have quail. If we do
that and we're only hit and cover quail cover on
a few of those spots, we're not going to have quail.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
You can't just have it in one spot. You had
to have it in a lot of spots, and the.
Speaker 5 (20:23):
Cumulative effect of all that vegetation together is habitat for quail.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
That example really helps tie back to something that we
hit on pretty hard in episode one. We talked about
simplified landscape. I feel like every time I hear the
word monoculture, it's tied to a negative association to an
effect on wildlife.
Speaker 5 (20:43):
That is the opposite of what we want to do.
For most wildlife species. We want to have a diverse
plant community with a timing of sea production and fruit
production that is spread across the entire year. So those
two things are at oddsite with each other. Be very
hard if farmers had to go out there and harvest corn,
(21:05):
for example, if all the ears were ripe on different
days in different weeks. Right, But from a quail perspective,
we need plants that are going to produce food in June, July, August, September,
et cetera. And so the plant community needs to be
diverse enough that is producing food twelve months out of
the year and cover twelve months out of the year
and thermal cover twelve months out of the year. Monotypic
(21:27):
plant communities can't do that. The question then becomes how
do we get it? How do we create those resources
and conditions. If we could wave a magic wand that
would be great, but that's just not going to happen.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
That is the million covey question. We understand what we need,
but how do we go about getting it? What are
the chances of us getting in. Maybe it's hoping for
more landowners like Jimmy Bryan and Wilbert Primos to come
along and willingly put forth the effort and resources to
put quel habitat and quail back on their property. Maybe
(22:03):
it's conservation organizations like Quail Forever, who's done great work
over the last twenty years spreading the story of quail
and improving habitat on literally millions of acres. Maybe it's
government incentive programs to aid landowners. Maybe it's a combination
of all of it. Here's one thing I do know,
A guy like doctor James Martin doesn't get the reputation
he has without going through the trenches. He told me
(22:25):
he's been focused almost exclusively on quail for over twenty years.
That's twenty plus years of field work, research, working with landowners,
and gaining a whole lot of perspective. In the research
and conversations I had leading up to this episode, I
heard Bob White quail hunters referred to as hopeless romantics
and dreamers. But I want to know where James's attitude
(22:47):
has been from when he started quail work up until now.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
I would say it's a roller coaster with a positive trend.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
It's one of those coasters that.
Speaker 5 (23:01):
We haven't looked back around to the end yet, but
we're still on the upper trajectory. There's highs and lows,
for sure. I've seen several cycles now of various emphasis
put on quail by state agencies and federal government, and
so you ride those highs and waves of the availability
of financial resources. But the constant, and I wouldn't have
(23:25):
said this maybe twenty years ago, but the constant is
the hunting aspect.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
The constant motivating.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
Factor is there's still people out there really enjoy running
dogs on quail. And again not necessarily the harvest part,
but that part is always kind of the juice and
the roller coaster, and it keeps us going, and it
keeps state agencies going.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
We're still heading in the right direction.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
I think it does no good to be negative, right,
I mean, it's we are we face the realities we
know constraint, but we also know in this paper is
not published yet, but they're conservatively over six million quail
still in the United States, which is, you know, it
(24:13):
doesn't compare to probably the tens of millions that we're
here in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
But let's just move on past that.
Speaker 5 (24:20):
You know, this is what we have now, and then
there's plenty to work with. We're fortunate in this country
where we still have a lot of land. I've worked
in other countries where every stitch of it is used
for some type of production agriculture, or at least very
little of it it's available for wildlock conservation.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
We still have a lot of land available to us.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
We still have a culture that's in existence, that is
on life support, but it is in existence about hunting quail,
and so those ingredients we can build up ponds, and
so we always got to keep that in forefront of
our mind.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Okay, let's do a quick recap before we go into
the grand finale. We learn what the process was like
for a landowner to take a property void of Bob
white quail in their habitat and restore it. We learned
that an absolute essential ingredient for a positive future for
Bob white quail is passion. We learned in greater detail
what Bob white quail habitat actually is, and that having
(25:21):
that habatat on the landscape is non negotiable if we
want to have quail. And we learned that the general
attitude towards Bob white Quail persistence over the past two
decades has been a roller coaster with an overall positive trajectory.
My friends, we have danced all around the subject of
what the future of Bob white Quail is. But the
(25:41):
time for dancing is over, and now I'm going to
be direct. I'm going to ask doctor James Martin what
he believes the future of Bob white Quail is.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
What is the future Bob white Quail? Well, I can
tell you this. I would not have exposed my children,
and I'm gonna get emotional talk about this. I would
not have exposed my children to bird dolls and bird
hunting if I knew it was a dead end. I
know the passion that I have for it, and I
(26:15):
couldn't imagine dangling that carrot and that love in front
of them knowing that it might go away. That only
leads to a broken heart. Being a father will change
you instantly. It will make you never to want to
break your children's heart.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
I think any parent has that. So I thought about it.
Speaker 5 (26:40):
I mean I had a conscious conversation with myself, like
it was internal, you know, but it was conscious about
if you take him you can't take it from him.
It's like you would never expose your kids to baseball
if you knew the game was not going to exist
in ten years. So the best hope I can give you,
(27:01):
or the best display of my hope, is that I've
taken my ten year old son, Bertha.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
I want to thank all of you for listening to
Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this Country Life,
and I want to give a big shout out to
Onyx Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you like
this episode, share it with a friend, and make sure
you come back for the next one. Because if this
podcast was a quail hunt and we've only flushed two
covees so far and the dog's already back on point,
we're just getting started. We'll see y'all next time.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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