CONSERVING AMERICA'S QUAIL COUNTRY

PRESERVING A WAY OF LIFE

Estimates vary, but economic developers all agree that the preserves that bridge present-day Southwest Georgia with elements of its historic past have an annual multimilliondollar impact on the region.

Written by Carlton Fletcher Photography byKalia Bruner

t's the area's designation as "the quail capital of the world" that ties the bounty of the land to a way of life that has survived the modernization and urbanization of a fast-paced society hell-bent on leaving all vestiges of its past behind. These "plantations" are hunting preserves, large areas of land where animals are hunted in a controlled way for sport. I

That concept is anathema on the dozens of preserves where many industrialists and titans of industry come to get away from a world moving at light speed toward some new digital reality. These havens are sought as a throwback to the days that hunters supplied their families' sustenance by matching wits with species always threatened by man's urge to tame and leave his imprint of concrete and steel on ever more wilderness that long lay untainted.

A little more than five decades ago, quail hunting was indeed a sport of kings. According to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR), 135,000 hunters roamed the woods of the state, bagging some 4 million quail. Before the turn of the century, in 1998, those numbers had fallen precipitously, to 42,000 hunters harvesting 900,000 quail.

That alarming trend, left to continue unabated, was finally addressed by the DNR and the Georgia Legislature in 1999 with the Bobwhite Quail Initiative. And, ever so slowly, with conservation groups joining the battle, the trend finally started reversing itself in the latter part of the 2000s.

"The good news is that the quail population is now on the rise," Albany businessman Jason Wiggins, who with best bud and country music sensation Luke Bryan (a native son of Lee County) own Whispering Pines in neighboring Worth County, said of past threats to the indigenous bobwhite population. "So many people– on plantations and with conservation groups – started doing something about that trend, and the results are starting to show. Plantations (hunting preserves) like ours are part of a group working to improve quail habitat and to increase the birds' food supply. The trend has definitely been an increase in the population over the past few years."

The quail population is among the essential elements of modern plantation life, which is more nature preserve than anything, and that fact is one of the drivers of the efforts of the conservation science that is conducted at the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center at Ichauway in nearby Baker County and the Tall Timbers Research Station Foundation in Leon County, Fla. Both facilities were once hunting preserves owned by industrialists: The Jones Center, rising from the Ichuaway Plantation owned by Coca-Cola magnate Robert Woodruff in the 1920s and Tall Timbers, evolving from a hunting paradise owned by New Yorker Edward Beadel and, later, his nephew Henry Beadel. That family's purchase of the land outside Tallahassee, Fla., that would expand into Tall Timbers was made a century before, in 1826.

These outdoorsmen, wanting to be assured that the land they loved so well continued to teem with the wildlife with which they shared a bond, decreed in their wills that the land be reverted to wildlife and forest management areas where the science of conservation research and restoration might preserve what the world was rapidly losing.

"Our dogs are vital to commercial hunts, and we have somewhere between 175- 180 on site," said Benjie Deloach, general manager of Southern Woods Plantation in Worth County, said. "We have hunters who come in from all over the country and some international guests, so we sometimes schedule several hunts with groups of 18 all at the same time.

"To give them that experience that they come here for, we have to have some of the best-trained dogs,” he said. “That's a very important part of what we do here."

Allen Ingram, owner of the 1,300-acre Piney Creek Plantation in Terrell County, said that hunters who come to the Southwest Georgia woods to hunt quail are looking for a way of life, an experience very different from their everyday existence.

"It's all — the woods, the dogs, the lodge, the land, the people — a lifestyle," Ingram said. "We've built a reputation for having good, hard-flying birds, and we give the people who come here that experience they're looking for. At Piney Creek, we have a saying we live by: 'We'd rather have quality over quantity.'

"I've spent all my free time in the outdoors, had an old bird dog ever since I was old enough to pet one. I know what this lifestyle is like,” he said. “That's what we want to give everyone who comes to Piney Creek."

Hunters and their prey — the bobwhite quail — are essential elements of an outing, and the hunting lodge offers a rustic reminder of times past ... with modern conveniences. Bird dogs —Springer, Brittany and Cocker spaniels; English setters and pointers; German shorthair and wirehair pointers — are the third element of the hunt, as essential as the guns used to bag the birds as they explode from underbrush into the sweet Georgia air.

Some say the lifestyle that Ingram speaks of is anachronistic, fading remnants of a bygone era. Try telling that to the thousands who make their way to Southwest Georgia every fall, hoping to get in touch with that tiny bit of primitive self that each possesses. Civilization may be at their fingertips, in the cellphones and electronic devices to which most feel permanently attached. But when it's them, a good hunting dog and a covey of quail flushed from the brush and into the air, they're transported in a way nothing else will ever rival. ∞

ALBANY | ATHENS | ATLANTA | MACON www.pellicanoconstruction.com