If you’re like me, you think of wild quail hunting in southwest Mississippi as a thing of the past — as long-gone as a single in a cutover.
(That’s a single quail that has escaped into a giant briar patch, for you non-quail-hunters).
So how come the September-October issue of Mississippi Outdoors magazine has an article entitled “Bobwhite Quail Conservation: An update on efforts to help this important game bird”?
And how come the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative features a map showing southwest Mississippi — in particular the Homochitto National Forest area — as “having high potential for bobwhite management”?
“There’s a national effort across the range of the bobwhite that all states are trying to do something,” said Rick Hamrick, who coauthored the Mississippi Outdoors article along with Dave Godwin. Hamrick is small game program leader for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks.
“Of course, they (other states) are facing the same thing that we are. Land use has changed,” he said.
There’s reason to feel hopeless. Bobwhite quail populations have plunged 82 percent over the past 40 years. A Mississippi State University report in 1991 predicted the virtual demise of quail hunting in the state by the year 2000.
But in the late 1990s state wildlife agencies banded together to form the Southeast Quail Study Group, and the 2002 federal farm bill included support for quail habitat restoration.
“This first-ever regional recovery plan for bobwhites launched a new era and new hope for restoring this cultural icon — and the many wildlife species that share the same home,” according to the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative website.
Those species, by the way, include field sparrow, Bell’s vireo, dickcissel, red-cockaded woodpecker, brown-headed nuthatch, eastern meadowlark, eastern kingbird, Bewick’s wren, golden-winged warbler, blue-winged warbler, painted bunting, orchard oriole and eastern towhee, among many others.
The problem, of course, is there’s no easy way to restore quail habitat. Quail flourished in an era of small farms, pea patches and the like. Now we have pine plantations and pastures.
“Quail habitat must be managed at an adequate scale (often 5,000 acres or more) to produce populations that can be sustainably hunted,” the Mississippi Outdoors article says.
Management is intensive and involves disking, burning, thinning and controlling woody vegetation.
The Homochitto Forest shows promise with its restoration of longleaf pine forest, which includes all sorts of native grasses that quail like. Coveys have been showing up over the years — nothing dramatic, but enough to keep hunters coming back. The best places are the wide-open longleaf forests managed for red-cockaded woodpeckers.
On private land, there are coveys here and yonder, but not the kind of numbers to justify hunting. An effort in 2006 and 2007 to form a Quail Forever chapter and establish quail populations on private land fizzled.
For now, the best quail hunting hereabouts is at quail preserves in Walthall County, where hunters can pay to go after pen-raised birds.
Meanwhile, the state wildlife department provides free technical assistance to landowners, Hamrick said.
“It’s definitely a challenge, but we haven’t completely given up,” he said of wild quail restoration efforts.
“We don’t have visions of bringing things back the way they were in the ’50s or ’60s. We’re kind of looking at things the way they were in the ’80s.”
