LIVE ON RADIO, a quail fitted with a tiny transmitter can provide important data for researchers studying the birds and their habits. Extension wildlife specialist Dr. Dale Rollins, right, demonstrates radio telemetry tracking during a recent "Quail Appreciation" seminar in Glasscock County.

Managing Range Habitat Key
To Enhancing Quail Numbers

By Colleen Schreiber

GARDEN CITY, Texas — Managing for healthy, viable and thriving quail populations requires land managers to think and plan for quail every day of the year.

That was the gist of the message delivered here by San Angelo-based Extension wildlife specialist Dr. Dale Rollins during the first of several one-day intensive "Quail Appreciation" seminars scheduled throughout West Texas.

"We need to think about quail every day of the year," Rollins insisted. "Too often we think about them in the months of November through January."

As an example, he pointed to those who dry up their feeders as soon as deer season is over.

Rollins reminded listeners that all plants are important to quail. They provide not only food but also water and shelter. He encouraged land managers to become familiar with the top quail plants available on their ranch.

The ideal quail food, Rollins noted, is insects. They are the only food source that provides everything a quail needs, and insect diversity, he added, is a function of plant diversity.

Common West Texas plants that are also critical components for good quail habitat include croton, ragweed, broomweed, and all kinds of seed-producing plants.

Supplemental feeding, Rollins remarked, is likely to be more important this year because it’s been a poor seed-producing year.

More than any other single plant, he said, broomweed is the key to a good quail crop in West Texas.

"You show me a good broomweed year, and I’ll show you a good quail crop," Rollins told listeners. "Why is that? Primarily because of cover. From a quail’s eye, a good broomweed crop looks like a shopping mall. It predator-proofs the quail’s habitat."

Rollins recommended evaluating quail habitat through the eyes of an adult and also through the eyes of a chick quail. He pointed out the importance of knowing and appreciating the various kinds of cover a quail requires and what kind of vegetation provides that cover. Quail need nesting, loafing, feeding and escape cover, he noted.

Rollins told listeners that the single most limiting factor in terms of quality quail habitat is the degree of interspersed brush.

"You have to have the right amount and the right diversity," he said, "and it needs to be interspersed properly. For example, their food supply needs to be in close proximity to cover."

Unlike cattle, quail genetics can’t be managed and manipulated, therefore the most genetically fit quail is the one that’s out there, he said.

"We cannot change that. So if you want to increase quail numbers, you have to understand the limitations of that quail and change the habitat to better meet their needs."

The Extension wildlife specialist told listeners that quail and domestic livestock can be managed together, but no management scheme can maximize both quail and livestock production at the same time. There will always be tradeoffs, he noted.

For those who wish to manage for both, he suggested wearing a "camouflage cowboy hat," thinking as both a wildlife manager and a stockman.

"As a land manager you need to realize what the various tradeoffs will be," Rollins said. "Good range management for cattle is usually good range management for quail. The big exception to that is when one gets over-zealous in brush control."

Rainfall is closely tied to quail production. Research shows that production of young birds pretty well mirrors annual rainfall. In South Texas, researchers found that about 45 percent of the ups and downs in quail population are due to weather. Rollins said good quail management normally shines in years when it rains 14 inches, not 40. "Good range management always shines in a drouth," he explained. "You can hide a lot of things in 45-inch rainfall years."

However, the specialist reminded listeners that weather accounts for only half of the fate of the quail population; land managers control the other half.

The seminar included a variety of hands-on activities. Participants learned to sex and age quail. Rollins encouraged land managers to keep harvest records and to be particularly conscious of the age of birds harvested. Hens and immature birds, Rollins said, are more vulnerable to hunting.

Seminar participants also necropsied several quail to study the anatomy and various body functions. The quail’s wings, they learned, are designed for short, powerful flights. The average in-flight distance is 125 yards, which is why food must be in close proximity to escape cover.

The quail’s well-defined breast muscle, Rollins told the group, is an indication that they are designed for running rather than flying long distances. A quail’s breast meat is light in nature as opposed to the dove’s, whose breast meat is dark. The dove’s breast muscle is its flight muscle, and is dark because more myoglobin is stored there, providing the oxygen that fuels the muscle for longer flights.

Similarly, the meat on a quail’s legs is darker than that of a dove’s legs, because those are the muscles the quail uses for propulsion.

Rollins described the quail’s crop or craw as a "zip-lock bag," positioned on top of the bird’s breast simply because it’s the best location for the small bird to carry a little extra weight. The crop is nothing more than a storage container designed to aid in predator avoidance. It allows quail to load up on food and then retreat to the safety of a nearby lotebush to digest it, Rollins explained.

The quail stomach is divided into two parts, the glandular stomach and the muscular stomach, better known as the gizzard. That serves as the bird’s "jaw teeth," the area where food grinding occurs, and quail will often pick up sand and grit to use in the grinding process. Sometimes lead shot can even be found in the gizzard, Rollins noted.

The afternoon program at the James Currie Ranch east of Garden City included an overview of the management of the family operation since Currie’s grandfather began putting the land together in the early 1880s.

Back then, Currie said, the country was all open and his grandfather herded sheep from the San Angelo area down to the Mexican border. The sheep grazed south in the summer and then were herded north for shearing in the spring.

At one time his grandfather was herding 10,000 sheep and some cattle. Herding came to a rapid halt as homesteaders began making their claims and fencing up their country. His grandfather followed suit. Sheep at the time were more profitable, and consequently the percentage of sheep was on a steady incline for many years. Stockmen back then were not aware of the long-term damage being done to the natural resource, Currie said.

"Nature has a way of telling you when something is wrong," he told the group. "One of the first indications was that we started seeing the elimination of most of our good grasses. Then came the encroachment of mesquite and other noxious brush plants."

In the 1960s Currie began trying to correct some of the mistakes made in the past. Just as ranchers had to learn about proper grazing management, so did they learn about proper brush management techniques. Root plowing was the craze in the 1960s, and Curry, like most ranchers at the time, did solid plowing. There was no such thing as brush "sculpturing," primarily because at the time, fee hunting had not yet become popular.

Over the years, Currie’s brush program has followed the typical course. His philosophy has shifted from total eradication, the thinking in the 1960s, to control and finally to management of brush in such a way that it benefits not only his livestock but his wildlife enterprise as well. He still uses a D-7 dozer, but selectively, employing a grubber positioned on the front of his Cat to sculpture the landscape.

Most brush management programs can be done in such a fashion that they do their job but also benefit wildlife habitat. Some practices, such as mechanical control versus herbicidal control, are thought to be more conducive to quail management.

Mechanical control offers selectivity and provides soil disturbance, which in turn propagates weeds which are good for quail. Broadcast chemical applications, by contrast, are less selective and also depress weed production for a period of time.

Rollins showed participants how to improve quail habitat by such simple procedures as half cutting smooth-barked, multi-stemmed mesquites to make loafing cover.

"Quail houses," he explained, need to be dense from above but open at ground level. Lotebush and sand plum are the two of the best quail bushes in West Texas. Others that serve the purpose almost as well include javelina bush, catclaw, algerita, and large prickly pear. Rollins recommended doing about 10 half-cuttings over the size of a football field.

Finally, Rollins reminded listeners to "think before you treat your brush." Quail have "honey holes," he said. "Identify them before you do your brush work. If you’re going to maximize quail numbers, you have to maximize the landscape’s habitability for quail."

In addition to his brush management program, Currie incorporates a variety of other management techniques to improve quail habitat. He has 65 quail feeders strategically placed throughout the ranch. He’s careful not to concentrate the feeding areas so as to prevent predator concentration. The feeders are homemade, simply designed and cost only about $20 to make. A 55-gallon drum has holes punched in the sides and situated so that the holes are about eight inches off the ground. Currie says it’s only a matter of days after the feeders are filled that birds begin taking advantage of the supplemental feed.

One of the drawbacks to any supplemental feeding program, Rollins told listeners, is that research indicates that only about five percent of the supplemental feed actually goes to the targeted species. In South Texas a large majority is eaten by ants.

When Currie first started keeping quail records on his place in 1969, the percentage of blue quail was much higher, about 71 percent. Over the years, however, the percentage of blues decreased and the bobwhites increased. Currie attributed the change in part to a change in hunting practices.

"I got into hunting with dogs," he explained. "Before that I would drive to a windmill, go to a blue bush, flush the blues and shoot them, and that was a quail hunt."

Rollins told listeners he’s been puzzled by the demise of the blue quail throughout much of Texas.

"I’ve always thought the blue quail to be the Spanish goats of the quail world," Rollins said. "Something happened in 1988 and 1989, and we lost our blue quail. I never saw anything like it."

That year while hunting in Crockett County, he harvested some quail whose livers looked like pickleloaf, Rollins said. He didn’t think much about it at the time, but in the following years he’s thought back to that case many times. Though no scientific proof can be found, Rollins believes the demise of blue quail is disease-related, at least in part. Researchers, he said, know basically nothing about diseases in wild quail.

"As you clean your birds, if you see something abnormal, put it on ice and let me know."

Since that time Rollins has initiated several quail research projects.

Quail research, he said, has come a long way in recent years. For the last couple of years, quail research has revolved around radio telemetry work. Radio-collared quail have already proven some long-held theories wrong. For example, Rollins said, it was once thought that quail are monogamous. Now its known that it isn’t necessarily true.

One of the first research projects was designed to monitor post-burn survival and the cause of mortality of bobwhites in burned and unburned habitats; to monitor nest site selection in the first year after a burn; and to monitor nesting success in burned versus unburned habitats.

The study was conducted in Coke, Irion and Tom Green counties. Radio-marked quail were monitored on burned versus unburned sites immediately before, during and four months after winter burns.

Key findings, Rollins said, were that there was no difference in post-burn survival rates, and cause-specific mortality was similar between burned and unburned sites. No quail were killed directly by the fires; predation was the major cause of death at all study sites. Two-thirds of the mortalities were attributed to mammalian predators and about one-third caused by raptors. Two quail were killed by snakes. One of the interesting discoveries was that following a burn, more than half of the bobwhite nests, 12 of 21, and 67 percent of the blue quail nests, eight of 12, were situated in prickly pear.

Another study evaluated prickly pear as a predator deterrent in nest site selection by northern bobwhites. The objective was to determine if quail nests in prickly pear survive similarly to nests situated in conventional grass nest sites. The study was conducted in Coleman, Cottle, Crockett, Fisher, Reagan, Shackelford and Tom Green counties.

The researchers learned that survival of quail nests situated in prickly pear is enhanced, especially during drouth years or on heavily grazed rangeland with a scarcity of suitable bunchgrasses for nest sites. In addition, nest survival was higher on sites having more available grass nesting sites. When about 750 grass nest sites occurred per hectare (about 2.5 acres), there was no difference in survival between grass and prickly pear nests.

Rollins pointed out that the results varied by location. For example, nesting survival was higher in Shackelford versus Crockett County, as might be expected given the natural difference in grass cover.

"That proved to us that the more uniform we can make nesting cover, the greater the survivability," Rollins told the group.

A "trailmaster" surveillance system was used to provide 24-hour monitoring of simulated nests. One of the objectives of the study was to identify the type of predator based on physical evidence of predation left at the nest.

Results from that study indicated that raccoons were the most common nest predator, accounting for 85 percent of nests destroyed during the study. Variability of eggshell evidence precluded positive identification of the depredating species based upon eggshell evidence alone, Rollins said.

The study also tested the effect of egg size (chicken versus quail) on depredating behavior and physical evidence left at the scene. The study revealed that egg size has an inverse effect on eggshell evidence remaining at a nest site; eggshell evidence was available at 89 percent of chicken-egg nests, but at only three percent of quail-egg nests.

Another study currently underway is investigating whether intensive, short-term control of mammalian nest predators benefits quail survival and nest success. It also seeks to monitor population trends of "mesopredators" such as raccoons and skunks in response to short-term removal efforts.

Wild bobwhite hens were radio-marked so researchers could follow survival and nest success on sites that had been subjected to short-term intensive control. Cage traps were used to remove mesopredators in square-mile areas during April, just prior to nesting.

Preliminary results in which approximately 35 raccoons, 10 skunks, and 10 opossums per site were removed from the study area did not appear to improve hen survival or nest success.

"It appeared we were just digging a hole in the universe," Rollins said. "We removed predators and then more simply came in."

The study will be repeated next year.