Where’s Bob?

Loren Steffy

Why don’t we see more quail in Hays County?

Last year, Bob came to visit almost every morning. A young male quail, he would strut down the walkway, stopping to nab the occasional seed or bug that struck his fancy.

“Morning, Bob,” I’d say as I sipped my coffee from the other side of the window. Bob was busy. He didn’t have time for chitchat. In fact, I never heard him make his species’ famous whistle.

He was, of course, a northern bobwhite quail, hence my unimaginative name for him. (Perhaps I should have gotten more creative, but it fit him. Besides, I named a scrawny young rabbit Fiver, so I think I get a pass on “Bob.”)

Texas is one of just four states—along with Arizona, California, and New Mexico—that have four species of quail. Bobwhites and scaled, or “blue” quail, are the most common, although Montezuma and Gambel’s quail are found in some parts of the state.

I was glad to see Bob every morning because quail are a bellwether species, meaning they are among the first to feel the effects of environmental or ecosystem damage. Where the quail go, other species, such as the horned lizard, Texas tortoise, eastern meadowlark, Attwater’s prairie chicken (a grouse), and northern shrike follow. Quail require similar habitat to these species.

Photo: Wilfred Marissen/Shutterstock.com

Quail habitat

Mixed brush and open grassland are ideal bobwhite habitat. Rangeland with bunchgrasses and cactus, brushy dry creeks, and flood plains with some cropland are all good. In eastern portions of the bobwhite’s traditional near-total-Texas range, areas that are burned every three to five years have retained some quail, as have drier portions of its Texas range (everywhere but west of the Pecos). The planned use of fire—“prescribed burning”—can be a useful and inexpensive tool for bobwhite management, considering that they will not thrive in areas where the proportion of brush or woodland is more than 50 percent of available cover.

So where there is either too dense or, in urbanizing areas, too little cover, Texas quail populations are down significantly. The northern bobwhite population in Texas fell 75 percent between 1980 and 2005; scaled quail populations declined by 66% during the same period.

In Hays County, old timers remember abundant quail populations, but quail counts have dwindled in recent decades as they have in other parts of the state. Bob, in other words, was a straggler.

Population decline

In a nutshell, here are some reasons for quail population decline:

Fewer wildfires or managed burns, both of which keep habitat-choking plants and trees in check
Timber and farming practices that favor uniform crops and discourage ground cover
Overgrazing, which, combined with too little rainfall, can hurt quail populations; proper grazing can benefit quail habitat.
Large-scale brush removal
Decreased diversity of grasses and the use of exotic grasses in cattle production
Fewer open spaces as ranches get smaller and development grows; strong bobwhite populations need between 3,500 and 7,000 acres of habitat.

Quail and hunting

Quail are often associated with hunting. Indeed, Texas has about 175,000 quail hunters. And while that can be bad for individual quail, it can benefit the species overall. Quail hunting groups raise millions for quail research. One of the largest is the Park Cities Quail Coalition in the Dallas area, which has donated $15.4 million to quail research since 2006.

*The author and T. Boone Pickens at his Mesa Vista Ranch in 2018.* Photo: courtesy Loren Steffy

That group’s biggest supporter was billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who died in 2019. Pickens spent millions of his own money developing what many considered the world’s best quail habitat on about 27,000 acres of his Mesa Vista Ranch near Pampa in the Texas Panhandle.

In 2018, I went to the Mesa Vista for a Texas Monthly story about Pickens’ selling the 100-square-mile property. One of his conditions was that the new owner had to maintain the quail habitat Pickens had spent years perfecting.

Pickens spent years adding natural water features to his Mesa Vista property to encourage quail populations. By the time of his death in 2019, he had built one of the most robust quail populations in North America. Photo: courtesy Loren Steffy

Wildfire!

Unfortunately, the February-April 2024 wildfires in the Texas Panhandle scorched more than 1 million acres and devastated the Mesa Vista. “All that habitat that the quail were in, most of those plum thickets and sagebrush that T. Boone didn’t even graze for years because he wanted the wildlife to be plentiful, it burned all that,” Kylee Chester, who bought part of the Mesa Vista in 2022, told Outdoor Life. “Of those 27,000 acres, it probably burned around 26,000.”

We don’t know how many birds the fire may have destroyed. A representative of the Texas A&M Forest Service mentioned to me recently that the timing of the fires, coming so early in spring, means most quail hadn’t laid eggs yet, a piece of luck that could help the population recover if they can find new nesting areas.

But that presents another problem. The size of the burn area and the loss of ground cover could pose a serious threat to quail and other ground-dwelling birds that survived the fires, leaving them vulnerable to predators such as hawks.

“Firebirds”

Fire, however, is a natural part of the ecological system in West Texas, and once the area gets rain, grasslands, including prime quail habitat, should return quickly. Quail are sometimes called “fire birds,” because they respond positively to managed fires used to control ground vegetation. In fact, the National Bobwhite & Grassland Initiative argues that fire prevention in quail habitats may have contributed to their decline. Fire helps keep in check species like Ashe juniper and mesquite, which can choke out the grasses and ground cover quail love.

Controlled burns vs. wildfires

Photo: Robert Wilder Jr/Shutterstock.com

“Prescribed burning is different than wildfire,” Dale Rollins, a quail expert and outreach coordinator for the Rolling Plains Quail Research Foundation, told Outdoor Life. “Based on what I’m hearing and the pictures that I’m seeing, it’s a moonscape out there [in the Panhandle]. It burned hot and scorched a lot of earth. Fire itself is a natural process…but the scope and the conditions in which this fire has burned are different than what we like to prescribe.”

But Bob’s in luck!

Fortunately for Bob and his friends, the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension and Texas Parks and Wildlife formed the Reversing the Quail Decline Initiative (RQDI) in 2013 to study and address the drop in quail populations. Since then, it has funded 13 projects at Texas universities and has launched a number of support programs.

The Extension Service also started the Texas Quail Index to educate landowners, hunters, and the public about quail populations, habitat requirements, and other factors affecting bobwhites.

By the way, April is when the quail counts began in our region. My property isn’t big enough to support a thriving quail population, but we live next to a large ranch (owned by a Master Naturalist) that does. I suspect Bob was visiting from next door, perhaps looking for water because of the drought. With our recent rains, he may not need to stop by this spring, but I’ve got my coffee ready just in case he comes strutting down the walk.

More? Texas A&M AgriLife Extension’s YouTube channel has many videos on quail, from habitat creation to how to check the birds for eye worms. Yes, if wildfire wasn’t enough, Bob could have eyeworms.

About the Cover…

Butterfly Festival