Lee Leschper
“Sadie! Over!”
For the 200th time, the willing Shorthair switched directions and circled back to the right, probing each weedy pocket of brush, still looking for the bobwhite quail we’d hoped to find.
And hope was fading fast.
We’d walked several miles of prime Rolling Plains range land during the day, trying to catch the last glimmer of hope to salvage the fading quail season.
Quail hunts come in two varieties.
There are those days when the first covey is close to the truck, the dogs are pointing before you’ve loaded the shotgun, and there are enough coveys that you don’t even bother following the singles.
Those are the days that quail men live for.
Then there are the others, when it seems a giant vacuum has sucked every quail out of the fields, when you begin to wonder if you have forgotten how to hunt quail or maybe or the old dog has lost her nose.
We’d found two coveys in half a day. Both less than a dozen birds. I managed to scratch two quail from the first. On the second I flat blew it, and called the dog off what I thought was a false point….until the birds flushed out of range.
We were headed back to the truck, the sun not set, but losing intensity fast.
And then she did the most beautiful thing a pointer can do. In mid-stride she switched back on herself and froze in that head-down, nose-up poise that screams “QUAIL!”
She was nosed into the edge of a small ditch, just a couple of feet wide, thick with weeds the cows had missed.
When I stepped past her nose, the beautiful sound of quail wings buzzed through the air.
But just three bobwhites erupted from the ditch,
The shotgun was tracking the closest, but instead of slapping the trigger I dropped the muzzle and eased the safety back on.
“Last of that covey,” I whispered to the puzzled dog. “Better leave some for next year Sadie. Let’s go home.”
***
Texas quail season ends Feb. 25 and for most of the state, it can’t come too soon. The combination of lingering drought and reduced habitat has left the little game birds no place to hide (or nest). As a result, Texas bobwhite populations are dramatically lower than just a couple of years ago.
Most of the best quail country in Texas (which means the world) still provides large dense stands of wild bunch grasses that the birds prefer for nesting. Droughts not only stop new growth, but turn hungry cattle onto the older stuff. Quail can’t nest in a parking lot and a lot of once prime quail country last year was grazed down to near-asphalt conditions.
The longer drought continues, the less cover remains and the smaller the number of remaining bobwhites to rebuild the population again when conditions improve. While we’ll almost certainly have “up” quail years again, it may be two or three years, with favorable conditions, before the birds can rebuild their numbers. And it might be a decade before we see quail numbers like those of just two seasons ago.
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Quail management is getting a lot more attention and Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Texas Quail Conservation Initiative, a recovery plan developed by a consortium of wildlife experts and quail stakeholders, can provide advice and tools for landowners.
TPWD’s new Managed Lands Gamebird Program can provide free wildlife biologists and hands-on advice for landowners. This includes tips on Federal funding for some conservation programs.
For more information call 1-800-792-1112.
There’s also a new comprehensive book, “Texas Quails” that provides detail information from dozens of quail experts on each of the four Texas quail species. It’s available from Texas A&M; University Press.
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Leschper’s outdoor column appears weekly in newspapers throughout Texas. Email him at lee.leschper@yahoo.com.
