Texas Quails: Ecology and Management

1. Introduction

3 1 Introduction Leonard A. Brennan, Fidel Hernández, and Fred C. Bryant The landscape of any farm [or ranch] is the owner’s portrait of himself. A. Leopold (1939) Wild quails, and the opportunities to hunt, photograph, or simply watch them, are among the most important wildlife resources in Texas. During the past 20–30 years, as bobwhite populations have declined in East Texas and elsewhere throughout the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, quail hunters have gravitated toward South and West Texas in search of quail hunting. Parts of Texas have the reputation of being some of the last great places for wild quails in North America. The reputation Texas enjoys as a mecca for quail hunting draws millions of dollars from wealthy urban areas to struggling rural economies. The current importance of quails in Texas points to a new era of wildlife management in which game animals are a cultural and economic resource equal to traditional agricultural commodities such as livestock and timber. Texas quails have been the focus of a rich legacy of creative and visionary wildlife research (Lehmann 1984; Hellickson and Radomski 1999; Guthery 2000, 2002; Hernández, Guthery, and Kuvlesky 2002). We know a great deal about the basic biology, physiology, and natural history of quails in Texas and elsewhere. We also have pillars of knowledge about the basics of quail management (chapter 24). Nevertheless, numerous questions remain about factors that limit quail populations and how these limiting factors can be mitigated through management, especially during times of drought. Land-Use Lessons from the Southeastern United States The declines that have been so pervasive across vast areas of the eastern part of the geographic range of the northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus ) are a direct function of habitat loss in relation to changing land uses in agriculture, forestry, and urban-suburban development encroaching into rural areas. From the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, a “quail wave” rolled through the southeastern United States (Rollins 2002). This widespread abundance of northern bobwhites was largely an accidental function of primitive agriculture and an entrenched rural culture of woods burning in the southern states (Leopold 1929). Over time, modern, clean-farming methods dominated the agricultural landscape , and the widespread use of fire became less prevalent. Concomitant with the decline in use of fire was the development of high-density planted-pine silviculture (primarily loblolly pine, Pinus taeda). Neither of these modern agricultural or silvicultural landscapes provides much in the way of habitat space for quails. When the inexorable losses from urban-suburban encroachment into once-rural areas were added to the losses from changing agricultural and silvicultural land uses, it was inevitable that extensive areas of the early-successional grassland and open forest habitats that supported vast numbers of quails would be negatively impacted (Peterson, Wu, and Rho 2002). Despite the widespread declines and local extinctions of quail populations throughout the Southeast, remnant, scattered populations of relatively abundant bobwhites (with densities often greater than 2.5 birds per acre, or a bird per acre) can be found in various places throughout Coastal Plain states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Aggressive habitat management is responsible for maintaining these remnant populations of quails in what is otherwise a large region of unsuitable habitat. Where people manage quail habitat on areas where the minimum area is between 400 and 2,000 hectares (1,000 and 5,000 acres), wild populations of quails can, and do, persist despite the broadscale declines (figure 1.1). The concept of using management strategies that provide habitat space is the foundation of effective quail management anywhere, including Texas. Texas Quails: From Accident to Management A number of accidental cultural and land-use factors have occurred to make parts of Texas one of the last great places for quails. For more than a century, the presence of large, private landholdings such as King Ranch, Kenedy Ranch, and other parcels that range from tens to hundreds of thousands of acres, formed the backbone of quail habitat across large regions of Texas (Lehmann 1984). Unlike the quail plantations of southern Georgia and northern Florida, where intensive management is used to maintain usable habitat space for quails, these birds have been a by-product of range management for livestock in South Texas (Guthery 1986). Sustainable management techniques that produce habitat space for quails will be the primary strategy for perpetuating huntable populations of wild quails across the Texas landscape. Raising the Stakes Many quail populations in Texas...