Quail on downside of boom-and-bust cycle
Texas quail and Texas quail hunters live in a boom-or-bust world, their intertwined fates annually determined, to a large degree, by the roll-ofthe-dice capriciousness of Texas weather.
Get lucky — see a year with a mild, wet winter and spring followed by a moderate summer that brings timely showers to fuel grasses and insects — and the world turns to quail. At least it does in the fairly limited regions of the state holding extensive suitable habitat for what once was the nation’s most popular and iconic upland game bird.
Roll “snake eyes” — see too little rain at the right time, too much rain at the wrong time or a blistering hot spell that desiccates nesting cover and food and exposes adult quail and their “bumblebee” chicks to predation and physical collapse — and quail evaporate like dew on a blastfurnace August morning.
Texas quail hunters understand this. At least those with a few quail seasons under their King Ranch bird belts do. They revel in the great years, getting afield as much as possible knowing such bountiful seasons are rare and precious things. And they grit their teeth and make do, hunting less, shooting covey rises only and not pushing the singles that scatter from those rises or maybe not hunting at all, when the birds’ and quail hunters’ fortunes take a tumble.
As Texas’ 2018-19 quail season gets underway — it opened statewide Oct. 27 and runs through Feb. 24 — the up-and-down world of Texas quail appears to be riding the latter part of that cycle.
This year, bobwhite quail populations declined from the previous year in all seven Texas ecological regions holding decent quail habitat, according to results of a survey state wildlife managers have conducted annually since 1978.
“Our surveys statewide indicate bobwhite numbers are below the 15-year average, and that’s due mainly to the weather,” Robert Perez, upland game bird program leader for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, said in a report.
Those surveys involve trained observers driving randomized 20-mile routes in early August, stopping at one-mile intervals to record the number of quail seen or heard. The survey is not designed to produce an exact estimate of quail numbers but to be an index that can be compared with results from previous years, showing population trends.
This year’s index of bobwhite relative abundance is below the 15-year average in all but one of the regions surveyed — significantly below that average in some regions. And the decline from this past year is as high as 80 percent in some regions.
In the state’s premier remaining bobwhite range — in the South Texas, Rolling Plains, High Plains and Gulf Prairies ecological regions — only the High Plains’ quail index is above the 15-year average.
Those quail numbers are very different from what hunters saw just a two or three seasons ago, when back-to-back years of almost-perfect conditions resulted in a quail boom that had bobwhite populations in some regions hit peaks not reached in decades.
Rollercoaster world
No other region of the state more clearly illustrates the recent rollercoaster world of Texas quail and quail hunting than the Rolling Plains.
The 40-county Rolling Plains ecological area, wedged between the Cross Timbers region of northcentral Texas and the High Plains region of the Panhandle, holds some of the state’s remaining premier quail habitat. The mix of native grasslands, shrubs and scattered woodlands along waterways in the region offer the complex matrix of habitats the ground-nesting quail require to thrive. But that landscape, and the quail on it, thrive best those rare times when the right combination of weather comes together.
From 2015 to 2017, backto-back mild and wet winters and springs triggered flushes of grasses and other vegetation that allowed quail to go into the spring-summer nesting season in excellent physical condition.
A rich carpet of rain fueled grasses, especially native bunch grasses, provided an abundance of nesting cover and produced a bumper crop of insects to feed quail and their chicks. A moderate summer followed with decent ground moisture and a good supply of leafy, low shrubs for cover from sun and predators over a long and very successful nesting season.
The result was an explosion of quail.
In 2011, a year that set records for drought and heat, and 2012, when the habitat had not recovered from that devastating drought, the quail population indexes for the Rolling Plains were 5.4 and 3.8 quail per survey route, respectively. By 2015 and 2016, that index had rocketed to 41.6 and 53.9.
Those halcyon quail seasons of 2015-16 and 2016-17 were the best in the memory of all but the oldest Rolling Plains quail hunters. During the 2016-17 hunting season, quail hunters participating in public hunts on the Matador Wildlife Management Area, a 28,000-acre tract of TPWD-managed land in the Rolling Plains’ Cottle County, took a stunning 10,555 quail. That shattered the previous record of 8,300 taken during the 1986 season most veteran Texas quail hunters consider the best in the past 40 years — this from a tract that in 2012 saw hunters take a total of just 18 quail for the entire season.
But the bubble could not last. After a poor year in 2017 that saw the Rolling Plains quail index drop to half the 2016 index, this year sent it lower. This past winter was rough in the Rolling Plains. Much of the region went without rain for as long as three months. Spring was dry and hot. Quail nesting cover evaporated, as did quail body condition. Mating and nesting efforts were minimal, and success of the few quail hens who did nest was almost nonexistent.
Late in July, rains did come, improving conditions and giving hope that the quail would take advantage of the reinvigorated landscape to pull off a strong late-season nesting effort. That late hatch didn’t happen, according to most observers in the area. At least not on a wide scale. And any chicks hatched late in the summer faced serious threats to survival when heavy rains hit the area during September. Young quail can die from the chilling effects of getting soaked before their feathers have developed enough to protect and insulate them.
This year’s Rolling Plains quail population index of 5.43 birds per route surveyed is almost 90 percent below the 2016 index and barely a quarter of the 15-year mean of 19.63 quail per surveyed route.
This year’s openingweekend results at Matador WMA reflected this tumble; three dozen hunters took a total of 13 quail on the 28,000-acre area.
Not so dire everywhere
The situation in the South Texas Brush Country, the state’s other premier quail area, doesn’t look as dire as on the Rolling Plains. The 2018 South Texas quail population index of 10.5 birds per survey route is down only slightly from this past year’s 11.5 and not much below the 15-year mean of 11.8 quail. But it’s down more than half from 2015’s index of 26.1.
Conditions across South Texas quail country were highly variable this year, with the eastern portion of the region, especially the Sand Plains area, seeing beneficial, timely rains that helped the birds. But very dry conditions early in the year, particularly in the western part of the ecological area, hurt quail nesting efforts and success. Still, some pockets of the region held on to good quail numbers and decent production. Quail habitat in most of the region greatly benefited from latesummer rains, with a tremendous “green-up” setting the stage for good fall and winter habitat for quail but making for challenging hunting conditions in areas.
Texas’ Gulf Coast Prairies ecological area saw its quail index slip this year, with weather-related issues having a great bit of influence on that decline. But unlike other regions of Texas, the problem hasn’t been too little rain; it’s been too much rain.
Because the area typically averages significantly more rainfall than the more western quail range, drought is seldom an issue for the region’s bobwhites. Flooding can be, though. Heavy rains during the heart of spring/early summer nesting season can flood quail nests or result in high mortality of quail chicks.
The Gulf Coast Prairies’ bobwhites did quite well during the dry years earlier this decade, with the population index surging to a recent peak of 23.3 quail per survey route in 2014 and holding above the 15-year mean for all but one year from 2011 through 2015.
But back-to-back years of heavy flooding during spring nesting seasons of 2015 and 2016 and the tremendous flooding associated with Hurricane Harvey in 2017 took a toll on the ground-nesting birds. This year’s index of 6.6 quail per route is barely half the 15-year average of 12.7 birds.
With quail numbers down this year, expect quail hunter numbers to follow that trend.
During the 2012-13 quail season, when quail numbers across the state were at their recent nadir, TPWD surveys estimated only 25,300 quail hunters went afield, taking an estimated 195,000 birds. Just four years later, with quail numbers booming, an estimated 91,500 quail hunters went afield during the 2016-17 season, taking 1.87 million quail.
This year’s downturn is just the latest in what has always been a cycle of ups and downs for quail and quail hunters. Still, some pockets of outstanding quail habitat and quail numbers are out there.
The rest will hope for a mild winter and spring, a not-too-hot summer and rains at the right time. The pendulum will swing back, they figure.
Just when largely depends on the vagaries of Texas weather.