Blue quail keep state hunters on their toes
MARFA — Blue quail are not gentlemen.
Unlike their bobwhite cousins that are known as “Gentleman Bobs” by wingshooters across the county, blues — officially known as scaled quail — just don’t play fair.
Bobwhite quail generally flush from the brush in a flapping winged flurry, offering classic wingshooting opportunities that have been depicted in photos and fine art for decades.
On the other hand, blues found in the cactus-studded, rock-strewn thorny brush landscape of West Texas tend to run and scatter in a hurry whenever a hunter gets within shotgun range.
Bagging a limit of blues normally requires a lot of brush-busting legwork and fast-action scattergun shooting that will wear out even the most seasoned quail hunting enthusiast.
Fortunately for those hunters willing to brave the West Texas conditions this year, a booming population of blues is providing ample opportunities for encounters with their favorite feathered prizes of winter.
“We’ve had four or five good quail years in a row. We’ve been lucky to get the rains at the right time — some pastures this year had a third hatch, which is very unusual,” said Mac Stringfellow, who hosts hunts for family and friends each year on his 13,500-acre ranch near Marfa.
“I don’t know how it happens, but the quail are faster than last year and the mountains are steeper,” he added with his tongue firmly in his cheek.
‘They run like the devil’
On a hunt last past month for 17 members of the Sportsman Club of San Antonio, coveys of blue quail were in abundance, with the elusive birds living up to their reputation as tough to put down on the ground.
“They run like the devil,’’ said Alex Hamilton of San Antonio. “About the only way to get up on them is to drive slowly and try to get as close as you can before shooting them in the road.”
Using a hunting method designed to cover a lot of rugged territory in search of the brush-hugging birds, hunters in the group were bounced around in several fourwheel-drive vehicles along glorified goat trails bulldozed across the property until blues were spotted.
Time and again, hunters bailed out of the vehicles to test their shooting skills against the blues that seldom offered any air time, behaving more like hot-footed rabbits than gentlemanly game birds.
Any blue encounter that ended with four or five hunters in the group bagging more than a couple of birds in coveys that typically averaged about 20 blues was considered quite a success.
“These blues are just harder to kill. They are really tough,’’ said Bill Provine, a retired Texas Parks & Wildlife De- partment biologist from Austin.
“We had one running bird we shot four times, knocking it over each time, and it still got away in the brush. Even if you know right where the quail dropped, they can be hard to find if they are not belly up on the ground.
“These backs of the blues are colored just like some of the rocks out here, and there are a lot of rocks around,’’ he said.
West Texas numbers up
The booming blue quail population in West Texas was predicted earlier this year after the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department’s annual statewide quail surveys. The quail counts, initiated in 1978, are conducted each year by TP&W biologists across the state to help monitor bird numbers.
Randomly selected 20-mile roadside survey lines are monitored each year to determine annual quail population trends by ecological region.
The average number of blue quail observed last spring in the Trans Pecos Region, including much of West Texas, was 16.60 birds. That compares with 30.52 in 2016 and 27.89 in 2015. Good carryover from previous years and multiple successful hatches helped increase the number of birds on the ground.
While the blue-quail hunting throughout the Trans Pecos Region has provided hunters with top-notch bird busting, the story has been a little different in South Texas.
Robert Perez, quail program leader with TP&W, said a moderate midsummer drought impacted the brood survival of the mainly bobwhite population in South Texas and the Edwards Plateau region.
“Hunters will likely see more adult bobwhites in the bag compared to more productive years,” he said in a news release, explaining that carryover from the 2016-17 season will make up a good part of the quail falling to hunters’ shotguns.
The survey numbers for South Texas remained relatively stable, with 10.16 birds observed this year, compared with 13.97 in 2016 and 20.57 in 2015.
Quail hunting season across the state continues through Feb. 25. The daily bag limit for quail (any combination of either species) is 15, with no more than 45 in possession.
The bag limit is the maximum number that may be killed during the legal shooting hours in one day. Legal shooting hours for all nonmigratory game birds are 30 minutes before sunrise to 30 minutes after sunset.