Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
Speaker 1: wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
Speaker 1: conserving both. On this episode, I want to tell you
Speaker 1: about Bob white quail, a bird that once covered the
Speaker 1: entire North American continent in abundance, and the hunting culture
Speaker 1: centered completely around them that now has almost been completely forgotten.
Speaker 1: It's late January. I'm in North Mississippi, and the sound
Speaker 1: that you're hearing is me hiking through the woods. I've
Speaker 1: been at this all day with a new friend of
Speaker 1: mine and his dog. We're out hunting, but we're not
Speaker 1: here hunting deer. We're not here hunting ducks. We're not
Speaker 1: even here hunting squirrels. In fact, the few other hunters
Speaker 1: that we've crossed paths with today gave us odd looks
Speaker 1: when we told them what we were here after.
Speaker 2: What's the most cubes you found in today? You said, too,
Speaker 2: And both of them pretty sizeable cubies.
Speaker 1: You said, yeah, yeah, there's two covees in here.
Speaker 3: According to when I came in September.
Speaker 4: One was falling away that way here.
Speaker 2: I'm quite surprised we didn't push them because they usually well,
Speaker 2: we'll make a circle and come in the window.
Speaker 4: Be in our favor.
Speaker 5: Come.
Speaker 1: What we're hunting is bob white quail, an animal that
Speaker 1: is called this place, this state, this continent home since
Speaker 1: before any of us were alive on this earth. But
Speaker 1: unfortunately these days can be tough to find. Our mission
Speaker 1: today is simple, find wild quail. We're in an area
Speaker 1: where there still remains a huntable population. We hiked onward,
Speaker 1: following the dog through every thorn, bramble and cane thicket
Speaker 1: that she could find, until eventually she went on point,
Speaker 1: letting us know she had found a bird.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Burdon, what.
Speaker 1: You're hearing now is us making a game plan as
Speaker 1: to how to approach the dog on point and flush
Speaker 1: the bird. This can be extremely tricky putting ourselves in
Speaker 1: position for a good shot, given the type of thickets
Speaker 1: these birds call home. This next part, flushing the bird,
Speaker 1: is almost unbearably suspensable. You don't know where it's gonna happen,
Speaker 1: you don't know when it's gonna happen. You just walk
Speaker 1: towards the dog, waiting for the forest floor to erupt
Speaker 1: under your feet, and you better be ready.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's my fault. That was more mesmerized with the
Speaker 2: bird than anything. I think.
Speaker 1: Wow, I stood there, motionless in awe of what I
Speaker 1: had just seen. A single quail exploded out of that
Speaker 1: sea of thorny vines, flew right over the top of
Speaker 1: my head, and disappeared back into the brush so quickly
Speaker 1: that the whole insie that became a memory quicker than
Speaker 1: I could even process the fact that I had missed.
Speaker 1: We both missed, and frankly, I don't think either of
Speaker 1: us cared. But here's the big picture of all this.
Speaker 1: Like I mentioned earlier, Bob white quail or native here.
Speaker 1: They've called this entire continent home for a long time.
Speaker 1: There's research that even has them on the landscape up
Speaker 1: to a million years ago. That means that Bob white
Speaker 1: quail were flying in Whistling the same time that Willie
Speaker 1: mammoths and ground slots were still roaming around. That is
Speaker 1: wild to me. And at one point, not too long ago,
Speaker 1: there was so many that we had an entire hunting
Speaker 1: culture built around them, and now in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: they've been reduced to a fraction of what once was.
Speaker 1: And I'm on a mission to find out why. The
Speaker 1: guy that's going to help us do that as someone
Speaker 1: you probably already know. His name is Will Primos, and
Speaker 1: he's been a dear friend and mentor for me for
Speaker 1: well over a decade. You and I both know Will
Speaker 1: for spring turkey hunting, elk white tails, but I never
Speaker 1: knew he got his start hunting with Bob white quail.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting in Will's office. The room is filled with
Speaker 1: countless celebrations of the outdoors, antler's hand carved duck decoys,
Speaker 1: paintings of wild turkeys, countless books. And I've had the
Speaker 1: pleasure of knowing Will for a long time. But I
Speaker 1: couldn't help but notice his enthusiasm today. I think he's
Speaker 1: excited to share this story.
Speaker 6: My uncle Gus was a devoted quail hunter. He had
Speaker 6: pointers and shutters, and I can still remember the setter.
Speaker 6: Her name was Cheyenne, and I got paid a quarter
Speaker 6: for school get up, and he lived like a real
Speaker 6: third of a mile away.
Speaker 4: You know, it wasn't very far, but I could get
Speaker 4: there on my bicycle.
Speaker 6: No, I would go over there, run over there and
Speaker 6: for a quorder. I got the cleaning dog pins and
Speaker 6: that started probably when I was about eight years old.
Speaker 1: Will's connection the quail and bird dogs started and he
Speaker 1: was just a boy in rural Mississippi in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: Little did he know that this would start a fire
Speaker 1: that would burn for a lifetime.
Speaker 3: Here's more from Will about his uncle Gus.
Speaker 6: But his friend was Buck Deerman, and Buck Buck came
Speaker 6: a fast friend of mine. As I grew over, Buck
Speaker 6: and Gus would go quail hunting.
Speaker 4: And Madison County.
Speaker 6: Which is where we are right now, where I live,
Speaker 6: back then was a rural setting. Used to be big,
Speaker 6: huge cotton plantations, rolling cotton plantations. And back then what
Speaker 6: they did the crime was very fertile that had never
Speaker 6: been farm or anything.
Speaker 3: They clear it.
Speaker 6: They'd plant their crops, and when they depleted the nourishment
Speaker 6: of the soul.
Speaker 4: They didn't have furlizer stuff.
Speaker 6: They just go clear another patch of land and that
Speaker 6: other would grow up. And over the many, many decades
Speaker 6: and years, Madison County became small rural farm vegetable gardens
Speaker 6: and people who wanted to live in the country.
Speaker 4: Is everywhere, no posted signs.
Speaker 6: You just pulled up gut out of your car and
Speaker 6: it was just perfect quail habitat.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that at the time, I just thought
Speaker 4: that was normal.
Speaker 1: What Will just told us there is one of the
Speaker 1: most important parts of this entire story. It's really not
Speaker 1: even about quail. It's quail habitat. Remember that because that
Speaker 1: detail is going to become more relevant later on.
Speaker 6: But Buck was very long legged, and Gus was almost
Speaker 6: as long legged. And here this little kid is and
Speaker 6: just trying to keep up with them. But to see
Speaker 6: the dogs work, and they wouldn't let me carry a
Speaker 6: gun in those early years, but I got to be
Speaker 6: there and watch the dog's point, watch them shoot, and
Speaker 6: both of them shot browning automatics, you know, the old
Speaker 6: Belgian may Old hump back, you know.
Speaker 4: Anyway, my uncle Gust died a few years ago, but I.
Speaker 6: Remember in his home he had a beautiful den where
Speaker 6: he would entertain. He was a big business man. He
Speaker 6: had entertained and he had a portrait commission to portrait
Speaker 6: to be made of him kneeling down with his shotgun
Speaker 6: with cheyenne.
Speaker 1: I got a chance to see this painting, and frankly,
Speaker 1: it's incredible. A square jawed man with black hair wearing
Speaker 1: a khaki jacket knelt down with his bird dogs. And
Speaker 1: I couldn't help but notice how much of a resemblance
Speaker 1: it had to Will.
Speaker 3: I think this gives.
Speaker 1: Us a really clear picture into how important and valued
Speaker 1: quail and quail hunting was at the time.
Speaker 3: I mean, think about it.
Speaker 1: How many people do you know these days that commission
Speaker 1: a painter to do a portrait of their duck, dog
Speaker 1: or a deer that they shot. Bob White quail meant
Speaker 1: something to these people. But what really sticks out to
Speaker 1: me is the background of this painting. It looks nothing
Speaker 1: like what Madison County, Mississippi looks like today.
Speaker 4: Today.
Speaker 1: It's neighborhoods, business parks, pine plantations. Whether he meant to
Speaker 1: or not, Will showing us this painting gave us one
Speaker 1: of the most crucial pieces to this quail puzzle, its habitat.
Speaker 1: I now want to hear from a biologist to give
Speaker 1: us more on this quail story. Mark McConnell is an
Speaker 1: upland bird professor at Mississippi State University. He starts off
Speaker 1: by talking about Tall Timbers. FYI, this is one of
Speaker 1: the nation's largest quail research centers located in South Georgia.
Speaker 7: Some of the early research I know you know about
Speaker 7: Tall Timbers Research Station, Well, that research station was started
Speaker 7: as a response to quail decline even in that part
Speaker 7: of the world.
Speaker 3: Right that book right.
Speaker 7: There on my desk, right next to you, that's considered
Speaker 7: like the quail Bible. It was like the first really
Speaker 7: robust study of Bob White. They started that study. They
Speaker 7: published in nineteen thirty one, but they started it, you know,
Speaker 7: several years before.
Speaker 1: That nineteen thirty one, so they were already seeing declines
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 3: They were seeing declines in the late eighteen nineties.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, I did not know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: You hear a lot of people say, oh, they've been
Speaker 7: declined since the sixties. The longason we say that is
Speaker 7: because the Breeding Bird Survey started in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 7: So that's the first documented decline.
Speaker 1: The eighteen nineties. Will was just telling us these incredible
Speaker 1: quail hunting stories from Mississippi in the nineteen fifties. Now
Speaker 1: Mark's telling us the decline started sixty years earlier than that.
Speaker 4: I can't keep up.
Speaker 1: I want to ask Mark about quail declines in densities.
Speaker 7: And there's a fair amount of reasons for that. If
Speaker 7: you think about what was going on in the country
Speaker 7: and kind of some of the industrial nature of things.
Speaker 7: Herbert Stoddard said at the time that he thought a
Speaker 7: bird per acre was as good as you could ever get,
Speaker 7: and then they found out through time and tall timbers
Speaker 7: is a great example of this. You absolutely can get
Speaker 7: more than a bird breaker. There are there are places
Speaker 7: in the Red Hills that can hit a bird and
Speaker 7: a half two birds breaker. Now you don't stay there forever.
Speaker 7: You know, populations nothing goes up forever, right, but you
Speaker 7: can absolutely exceed that density to barying degrees. People would
Speaker 7: wet their pants over bird p Yeah, Mississippi. So kind
Speaker 7: of the story of Quail. If he started with thirty
Speaker 7: thousand foot view, the entire landscape change everything we did.
Speaker 7: The landscape, with very few exceptions, wasn't designed to mess
Speaker 7: up Quail, but it certainly messed up Quail. Think about, say,
Speaker 7: let's go eighteen ninety nineteen hundred somewhere in that pre
Speaker 7: World War One, think about what the landscape would have
Speaker 7: looked like. We did not have the Green Revolution of agriculture. Yet,
Speaker 7: we didn't have fescue yet. Oh the tall fescue. It's
Speaker 7: an exotic forage grass that we brought over to stabilize
Speaker 7: soil and it's a great winter forage because it's a
Speaker 7: cool season grass. It's a very challenging plant for quail management.
Speaker 7: So we know it was before Bermuda grass, it was
Speaker 7: before behaya grass. It was before all these exotic forage
Speaker 7: grasses took over grazing and forage production. It was before
Speaker 7: we were farming loblolly pine trees like road crops. That's
Speaker 7: about the time we kind of the national US policy
Speaker 7: was pretty much anti fire.
Speaker 3: Fire was a bad thing, right.
Speaker 7: So you've got industrialization, you've got expansion, you've got all
Speaker 7: these things happening over the next several years, and it
Speaker 7: just it all kind of just came together and congealed
Speaker 7: to just create a landscape where quail could not exist
Speaker 7: at high densities.
Speaker 1: That's one thing that it's interesting as I've done some
Speaker 1: of this digging and some of this research, is I'm
Speaker 1: thirty two years old. You take someone a little bit
Speaker 1: younger than me that grew up and let's just say
Speaker 1: Mississippi because is where we're at, but this could be
Speaker 1: applied to a lot of much of the Southeast. You
Speaker 1: take someone that's just a little bit younger than me,
Speaker 1: then a state of Mississippi that is virtually completely dominated
Speaker 1: by law Volley pine plantation lines. And to them, that's normal,
Speaker 1: that's Mississippi, that's our forest composition, that's what the state
Speaker 1: looks like. And what's wild is you really don't have
Speaker 1: to go that far back before it was wildly different.
Speaker 1: It's clear that the landscape changed in the United States
Speaker 1: dramatically in the nineteen hundreds, but why.
Speaker 7: You had the dust Bowl era and then you had
Speaker 7: all these conservation type approaches, but most of them were planning,
Speaker 7: you know, exotic grass to stabilize the soil, which you know,
Speaker 7: had a kind of initial Ooh, there's grass.
Speaker 3: Then I was like, oh god, it's bad grass, and.
Speaker 7: We kind of regretted it. And then right as you're
Speaker 7: ramping up in the sixties at the Green Revolution, we
Speaker 7: figured out, hey, corn is super limited on nitrogen. If
Speaker 7: we pour nitrogen into it, we could you know, double yields.
Speaker 7: Then we figured out synthetic herbicide, synthetic fertilizer, and then
Speaker 7: the Earl Betts, who was the Secretary of Agriculture after
Speaker 7: the Russian Week crisis, said hey, get bigger, get out
Speaker 7: in terms of agricultural farm detro to ditro. That was
Speaker 7: that was a statement from the Secretary of Agriculture in
Speaker 7: the United States.
Speaker 5: The Case State Radio Network presents an address by the
Speaker 5: Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, doctor Earl Buttons.
Speaker 5: We must learn in this next generation how to feed
Speaker 5: is many more people as we have learned to feed
Speaker 5: since the dawn of history. And do it at a
Speaker 5: time when there is no new western hemisphere to discover,
Speaker 5: when are no more prairies gods to flow, when the
Speaker 5: are no more virgin timber on arable land cut down?
Speaker 5: Do it at a time when we're losing arable and
Speaker 5: to the urban sprawl to highways. What's the ingridy we're
Speaker 5: going to put in to agriculture then to get this
Speaker 5: job done, science brain polom professional leadership for our scientists
Speaker 5: battle with mother Nature.
Speaker 1: Earl Butts was the United States Secretary of Agriculture from
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one to nineteen seventy six. During his time
Speaker 1: in this role, Butts drastically changed agriculture policy, which had
Speaker 1: significant impacts on the country's landscape. Some of his more
Speaker 1: notable acts include getting rid of a program that paid
Speaker 1: farmers to not plant all of their land and saying
Speaker 1: things like get big or get out and plant fence
Speaker 1: road to fence row. All of these things carry a
Speaker 1: synonymous message of urging and incentivizing more land being put
Speaker 1: into production. Doctor Mark McConnell has more thoughts on.
Speaker 3: This and that expanded ag.
Speaker 7: So I think you hear a lot of old timers
Speaker 7: talked about, Oh yeah, we used to go had a
Speaker 7: covey over here. We'd go hunt down the fence row
Speaker 7: when we were kids, go find a fence row. Nowadays
Speaker 7: there are no fence rows right, and what fence rows
Speaker 7: are left, they've got round up, or they're we'd eeded,
Speaker 7: you know whatever, they're clean. So we took all the
Speaker 7: fenceros out. Then we realized we got bigger, So the
Speaker 7: combines got bigger, and the equipment got bigger. So now
Speaker 7: you got a twenty four row planner when everybody was
Speaker 7: playing four row planner.
Speaker 3: So the fields got bigger.
Speaker 7: And as we expanded fields, we took out those margins,
Speaker 7: those areas, those odd areas, they probably weren't the best ground.
Speaker 7: But then maybe a separated of a fence line or
Speaker 7: property boundary. That's where people were finding quailed in the
Speaker 7: sixties in Mississippi. I've talked to old timers who were
Speaker 7: still hunting them pretty hard up into the early eighties,
Speaker 7: and they said, right about the early eighties they were like,
Speaker 7: a R.
Speaker 3: We're not gonna We're not gonna buy a new bird dog.
Speaker 1: I was talking to I was interviewing James Martin, but
Speaker 1: he said they were on their last bird. And I said, dude,
Speaker 1: that sounds.
Speaker 3: Like the title to the very in country song.
Speaker 4: Like that's a country song.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, on my last that would be depressing. But
Speaker 7: somebody should write that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can hear the tune in my head right now. Man,
Speaker 1: that sounds like a Muscadine bloodline song just waiting to
Speaker 1: be written. Mark and I are joking here, but many
Speaker 1: of us have fathers or grandfathers that have stories similar
Speaker 1: to this that were very real experiences for them. Think
Speaker 1: back to Will's uncle and his dog Shyenne. I even
Speaker 1: have a picture of my own grandfather with his English
Speaker 1: pointer when he was in his early thirties quail hunting
Speaker 1: in Webster County, Mississippi.
Speaker 4: Those days are gone now.
Speaker 1: If a fellow was driving around Mississippi these days with
Speaker 1: an English pointer, he would catch more than a few
Speaker 1: odd looks, and that is sad to me, but there
Speaker 1: is hope. Wilber Primo's is one of the guys that's
Speaker 1: doing something to get quail back on the landscape. You
Speaker 1: are one of the first people that I can remember
Speaker 1: that back when you had Rivers Run, you were doing
Speaker 1: things on that property to promote Bob Whaite quail.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I love conservation and love trying to understand what we
Speaker 6: did wrong and what caused some of these things not
Speaker 6: to go the way they could have to keep the
Speaker 6: tradition alive, and there's some people that are restoring them well.
Speaker 6: First off, a lot of it was roa crop. It
Speaker 6: was marginal rocrop, dry ground farming. It was not profitable,
Speaker 6: and so when I bought it again, looked at I said,
Speaker 6: what's the.
Speaker 4: Better use for this land?
Speaker 6: And I met with ended up meeting a guy named
Speaker 6: Nick Thomas who founded the company cost Stewart Link that
Speaker 6: puts controvation on the ground helps represent the growers to
Speaker 6: NRCS at FSA offices. I met with him and said, look,
Speaker 6: can I put this back into some type of quail habitat.
Speaker 6: He said, yeah, we planting warm season native grasses and
Speaker 6: we've got experts that'll help show you how to get ready,
Speaker 6: how to get the ground prepared, how to it'll take
Speaker 6: you over a year to get this going and get
Speaker 6: it planted. There's so much to learn. You got to
Speaker 6: have the right kind of planner. You got to choose
Speaker 6: the different grasses that were native to Mississippi. So I
Speaker 6: ended up with blue stem and Indian grass and gamma grass.
Speaker 4: I mean, it was, it was done. We had a
Speaker 4: few quail.
Speaker 6: You'd be on deer standing, you'd see you'd hear the quail,
Speaker 6: or you see them walk by.
Speaker 2: I remember that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was amazed. I hadn't seen it. That's the
Speaker 1: first time I was Probably that was I would have
Speaker 1: been twenty two years old. Yeah, and I don't think
Speaker 1: I had seen a quail since I was like twelve.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I saw those rivers running, I was amazed.
Speaker 4: And they walked by the edge of the woods.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And so when we did the grass and we gave
Speaker 6: them the habitat, I mean exploded. So the most fun
Speaker 6: for me was in the spring to step outside and
Speaker 6: to see how many males I could count singing. It
Speaker 6: never count. There's one, there's one, there's one. I think
Speaker 6: my highest I ever got to it was thirteen. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Oh it was really cool. Yeah, because you got to burn.
Speaker 4: You can't burn too much. You burn too often and
Speaker 4: gets too thick. It's too thick. That's not good. You know.
Speaker 4: Quail need to be able to run around on the ground.
Speaker 4: They got to run.
Speaker 6: Between the clumps of grasses. They got to have escape cover.
Speaker 6: I planted plums, thickets, I planted. I tried to do
Speaker 6: everything I could.
Speaker 4: It was fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What do you think the biggest hurdle is? You know,
Speaker 1: because I was talking to start to several folks about this,
Speaker 1: and it's like one of the biggest things that they
Speaker 1: think quail faced, just talking about specifically here at home
Speaker 1: in the Southeast, is that in order, because we talked
Speaker 1: about you have to be there almost has to be
Speaker 1: an intentionality about it. These days, if you're gonna have
Speaker 1: quail on a property and so to do that, you
Speaker 1: have to have people landowners, hunters that are interested in it.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of a tall order right now, because
Speaker 1: there's not too many places that someone could go and
Speaker 1: find quail. There's not too many places someone could go
Speaker 1: and find a good bird dog because you don't see
Speaker 1: too many people down here riding around with setters and
Speaker 1: pointers anymore. There's just they're gone for the most part.
Speaker 4: That's right. When you lose the resource, you lose a
Speaker 4: lot that goes with it.
Speaker 1: If you think about it, and I can get most
Speaker 1: upland hunters, can you romanticize about it? We all can
Speaker 1: we just lose a bird? We lost in entire hunting culture.
Speaker 1: And I liking it now because spring turkey hunting or
Speaker 1: duck hunting, or deer.
Speaker 3: Hunting, whatever. And I tell folks, imagine it was gone.
Speaker 1: All of it's Goneine, if you take like, think about
Speaker 1: deer hunt. Let's talk about deer. But if you take
Speaker 1: away the deer, then the deer hunt's gone. What else
Speaker 1: is gone?
Speaker 3: Deer camp, deer camp.
Speaker 1: Deer you weekends at deer camp, watching the football game
Speaker 1: and grilling out.
Speaker 3: That's gone now.
Speaker 1: Stories of you telling your buddies, checking your trail cameras
Speaker 1: all the time, It's all gone. I'm interested in how
Speaker 1: wildlife affects humans and human culture. And although much of
Speaker 1: it is gone now, coil used to dominate the hunting
Speaker 1: culture of the Southeast, much like deer camps dominate the
Speaker 1: hunting culture now.
Speaker 3: It was a different world.
Speaker 7: True.
Speaker 1: Here's Will on how he and his family used to
Speaker 1: celebrate quail season.
Speaker 6: They were a good many of guys like that, and
Speaker 6: they would have dinners over at Guss's house after season
Speaker 6: that have a big quail dinner, and by all of
Speaker 6: their friends that do it. I don't know how prevalent
Speaker 6: it was. You hear a lot of people that you
Speaker 6: meet today. I'm in my seventies and you hear a
Speaker 6: lot of people talk about, you know, their daddies and
Speaker 6: that are my age. So you know, we're almost one
Speaker 6: generation past it because it was the generation before me
Speaker 6: that had the quantity and the quality and had that opportunity.
Speaker 1: I don't know about y'all, but I would give an
Speaker 1: awful lot to be able to go back in time
Speaker 1: and attend one of those quail dinners at Will's uncle's house.
Speaker 1: And while I could continue on about the plight of
Speaker 1: the Bob White quail and the long lost hunting culture,
Speaker 1: I think it's important to point out that there is
Speaker 1: a silver lining here. In the past ten years, there's
Speaker 1: resurgence not just in quail, but in people people like you,
Speaker 1: people like me, people with an interest in quail, quail
Speaker 1: habitat and quail hunting.
Speaker 7: It's a different landscape, but where people are trying, they've
Speaker 7: got quit. That's kind of the resounding message of hope
Speaker 7: is if you've got them, and you've got some acreage,
Speaker 7: and you've got some buddiest next to you, that will
Speaker 7: help out.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of things you can do to.
Speaker 7: Keep everyone talks about and it is. That's a terribly
Speaker 7: depressing story of the quail. It really is. But the
Speaker 7: longer I've been doing this, I'm like, you know what, Yeah,
Speaker 7: it's depressing, but it's also pretty inspiring the fact that
Speaker 7: I like I can go to Rankin County. I did
Speaker 7: a site visit in Ranking County with John Mark Curtis,
Speaker 7: our quil Forever state biologist. We did a site visit
Speaker 7: got two years ago now and the guy had some pines,
Speaker 7: not many, couple hundred acres he was burning them with
Speaker 7: then them His neighbor had a tornado come through. I
Speaker 7: think it was a hardwood stand and just ripped it
Speaker 7: and es salvaged. It was like a nice little clear cut.
Speaker 7: There were quails singing everywhere in Rankin County, not far
Speaker 7: off major highway. And we're driving back and he said
Speaker 7: something pretty cool. He's like, you know, just about anywhere
Speaker 7: in this state, if people try, they can get quail.
Speaker 3: Now, they're not going to get a bird break.
Speaker 7: But this guy, I think he texts John Mark earlier
Speaker 7: or last late last year saying, oh, yeah, went out
Speaker 7: hunting with the bird, you know, the dog and found
Speaker 7: a few covees.
Speaker 3: You know, he was elated. He could not have been happier.
Speaker 3: And he wasn't doing anything all that unique anymore. I mean,
Speaker 3: he's just then his pies and was lighting fires every
Speaker 3: two years.
Speaker 1: So you're basically saying that the narrative of the Bob
Speaker 1: White quail here in the Southeast, rather than the plight.
Speaker 4: Of the Bob White.
Speaker 1: Quail, it should be more of like, look at this
Speaker 1: bird that refuses to give up.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: The resilience of Bob White to hang on.
Speaker 7: Now they've been locally exportrated from or you know, there's
Speaker 7: areas where you're not going to find them whatever, there's
Speaker 7: plenty of that. So the story that I like to
Speaker 7: focus on, Now, yes, we need to teach the historical demise,
Speaker 7: but the fact that these things are still around with
Speaker 7: everything we put against them, I mean, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: A bird that just won't give up. Now that's a
Speaker 1: story I can get behind. So let's take a quick
Speaker 1: look back at what we learned this week. Bob Whack
Speaker 1: quail have been kicking around on this continent for roughly
Speaker 1: a million years, meaning they crossed paths with and outlasted
Speaker 1: animals like the wooly mammoth and the groundsloth. I still
Speaker 1: think that's wild. We used to have them in great
Speaker 1: abundance until the first notable declines in the eighteen nineties. However,
Speaker 1: quail populations and quail hunting remained good up into the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties and sixties, and then, due to multiple factors
Speaker 1: such as agricultural expansion, urban sprawl, habitat loss, and many others,
Speaker 1: quail declines got worse. But like we just mentioned, this
Speaker 1: bird just refuses to quit. I want to thank all
Speaker 1: of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as
Speaker 1: Bear Grease in this Country Life, and I want to
Speaker 1: give a big shout out to Onyx Hunt for making
Speaker 1: this podcast possible. Next time, we're gonna learn what the
Speaker 1: future of Bob White Quayle could look like and what
Speaker 1: people like you and me can do to help keep
Speaker 1: them around