Tennessee’s State Game Bird:
The Bobwhite Quail Efforts Underway to Bring Back a Species in Demise
J
im Maddox knows a thing or two about trying to bring back a native bobwhite quail population. He’s been trying on his 1,700acre Yellow Creek Farm in Houston County for years. When he and his father bought the land together in 1986, it was twice as big. “3,400 acres is not twice as good as 1,700,” Maddox says. “It’s 10 times as good. You have to have enough land mass for any sort of wildlife plan to work well.” Maddox first went quail hunting when he was 12, more than 50 years ago. He says every five acres in and around Nashville held a covey, and that he could set the dogs out from his backyard in Belle Meade and have a good hunt. But things have changed. While theories abound, most agree that modern farming practices that utilize every inch of tillable ground have been the demise of the bobwhite. Quail habitat is largely fencerow and early successional growth, from brooding and breeding to nesting and feeding. What used to be a barnyard sure bet has become one you’d be hard pressed to find in Tennessee. Native wild quail – the state’s official game bird – have nearly disappeared. The Maddoxes noticed the decline for the first decade at Yellow Creek Farm. By the late ‘90s, the huntable populations didn’t exist. They launched an intensive plan to re-establish them, an effort Jim Maddox says was less than successful.
hens, and the next year 50 more. One day, he says he saw 500 in the farmhouse’s front yard. Clearly, the habitat improvement work had done wonders for the turkeys, and for deer and other important species. But a quail’s lifespan is much shorter – about 18 months, experts say. As a result, fragile populations have far less time to take hold. After a lot of research, the expertise of consultants from Quail Unlimited and trials with various methods of stocking, conditioning and landscape manipulations, the Maddoxes have come to the conclusion that stocking doesn’t work. “The studies have shown that wild birds won’t mix with the penraised, and stocking is really a function of how much do you hate your money,” Maddox says. Georgia, Texas and other states have managed to sustain native populations of quail, turkey, deer and predators on the same ground, but the answer may be found in the large expanses of undisturbed acreage. However, some states have had success with pilot projects on smaller sections. The key, experts say, is a wild covey to serve as a seed that can be cultivated. Maddox is hoping to see his population come back over time, as a result of the habitat work he’s conducted. As neighbors see the results, the word will hopefully spread to a larger area.
“The thought was, build the habitat and they will come,” he says. “We spent that entire first summer working on it, and many summers after – moving dirt, planting, bushhogging, burning… there was one wild covey before, and five years later there was apparently still one covey that we would find from time to time. The challenge proved to be greater than we expected.”
He says it’s not any one agricultural practice, but the accumulation, and the scale, that’s had such an impact. At Yellow Creek, they’ve planted native warm-season grasses, and some initiatives are working to convince more farmers to rotate out of fescue. Yet those cultivars have to mature for three years before harvest, and it’s hard to take land out of productivity for so long – cows need hay, and a farmer can get two bailings per year on a fescue field.
They had worked with the TWRA to stock 17 Eastern wild turkeys to later be trapped and relocated – a few years in, they trapped 100
“I’ve become an oasis in the desert for all the other species, but it just doesn’t seem to be big enough to sustain quail,” Maddox says. “You
10 | Spring 2012 | www.tnwf.org