Personal Account of Vanishing Bobwhites
Shannon Tompkins of the Houston Chronicle recently wrote a poignant, personal account of the decline of bobwhite quail in his home state of Texas. We’d love to run the piece in full but that’s a no-no, so here’s a link to the full piece – below are some excerpts:
- > A holiday high point would come when Dad would pull on his brown hunting vest, pull out his Browning “Sweet 16” and announce he was going to “walk up some birds.” [Yeah! Walk ’em up!]> We’d grab guns and gear and follow him to the wood-fenced field in which great-uncles grew corn for their livestock and a couple rows of “sweet corn,” beans and okra for themselves.
> We’d grab guns and gear and follow him to the wood-fenced field in which great-uncles grew corn for their livestock and a couple rows of “sweet corn,” beans and okra for themselves.
> Shotguns held at port arms, we’d slowly walk abreast down those fence rows and along the edges of the adjacent pasture and maybe hike over to the old, fallow cotton field in the woods and do the same along its fence rows. Now and again as we walked, the ground along the fence line would erupt in a heart-shocking flurry of feathers as a covey of bobwhite quail exploded from almost under our feet.
> On a good day, we’d kick up a half-dozen or so eight- to 20-bird coveys. On bad ones, we might bust just one or two bunches, but we always found quail.
> By the mid-1970s, it was rare to sit on the back porch and hear the familiar two-note call of quail coming from the fence rows of the now abandoned corn field. By the early 1980s, the corn field had grown up in thick brush, the cotton field was converted to a coastal Bermuda grass pasture and the native-grass pasture was a pine plantation. The quail were gone.
> The fate of bobwhite quail on that little patch of Polk County has been repeated across the South over the last 40 years. Estimates are that quail populations nationwide have declined almost 75 percent in the last quarter-century.
> Not surprising, quail hunting has shriveled with quail numbers. In the 1970s, almost 300,000 Texans hunted quail. Over the last five seasons, that average has dropped to about 76,000, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department surveys. This past quail season saw barely 53,000 quail hunters across Texas, the lowest number on record.
> Efforts are under way to conserve and better manage what quail habitat remains in Texas, and to build cooperative agreements between landowners for restoration of quail habitat and quail populations in areas where the birds have almost disappeared. But that’s awfully cold comfort to those of us who remember what Texas quail and quail hunting were like just a generation ago….
Don’t give up on the birds, gents!
Category: Northern Bobwhite, TX
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