Quail control work in progress

Quail restoration in Arkansas is progressing glacially, but the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission is comfortable that it is on the right path.

Chris Colclasure, deputy director for the Game and Fish Commission, recently visited a quail plantation in Georgia where I had the honor of hunting on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. It was inspiring to see so many quail in a wild environment behaving as wild quail should.

That landowner employs the most modern and progressive quail management practices to enhance and maintain quality quail habitat. They are consistent with what the Game and Fish Commission is attempting to accomplish on a statewide level. The activities convert or restore unsuitable or marginal quail habitat with prescribed burning and soil disturbance to re-establish native upland grasses, forbs and legumes.

The Georgia landowner releases a lot of pen-raised, flight-conditioned quail, but only because of the intense hunting pressure on his land, Colclasure said. The landowner entertains a lot of business clients, and they kill more birds than a population of exclusively wild birds can support.

“He said he wouldn’t do it if it were just him and a few of his friends hunting,” Colclasure said. “He said he could generate enough with wild birds if that were the case.”

Quail hunting was once strong in Arkansas, but not on the same scale as in Georgia. Quail hunting in Georgia and in the southeast in general has equal stature to duck hunting in Arkansas. Landowners invest millions of dollars in time, money and manpower to providing habitat for the diminutive bird with the distinctive “bob-WHITE” whistle.

Arkansas lost most of its bobwhite habitat to modern agricultural practices, residential and commercial development, and a conditioned aversion to prescribed burning.

Two years ago, former commissioner Fred Brown of Corning pledged to bring back the bobwhite. So far, the commission remains committed, and the quail restoration efforts have momentum. All they need is stamina. Don McKenzie, director of the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative, said that Arkansas is late to bobwhite restoration, but it is more aggressive than other states.

“The bobwhite challenge is the most difficult issue our (the wildlife management) profession has ever tried to tackle,” McKenzie said. “You have to go big, or it’s hardly worth going at all. I commend the agency for going big. I’ve worked with 25 state wildlife agencies, and I can tell you that nobody is doing more than Arkansas right now to tackle the quail problem.”

Marcus Asher, the commission’s quail biologist, outlined several goals for continued success. Habitat restoration must occur on a large scale and must involve multiple abutting landowners. Prescribed burns should occur every two years, and habitat should be a patchwork of uneven age components.

As always, the commission was curious about the effect that predators have on quail and wild turkeys. With sufficient amounts of habitat, quail can easily outpace predation losses, Asher said.

The same question influences waterfowl management. Ducks Unlimited emphasizes habitat. Delta Waterfowl emphasizes predator management.

Corporations own vast amounts of quail habitat in south Arkansas in the form of pine plantations. It is identical to the habitat in south Georgia, but prescribed fire has been abandoned in favor of herbicides. Fire promotes native flora. Herbicide eliminates it.

“Many of those landowners are short-term investors,” Colclasure said. “They do not invest in the manpower to do controlled burns. International

Paper and Georgia Pacific used to do that.”

The federal farm bill provides funds for landowners to conduct prescribed burning, but there are not enough contractors available to meet the demand, Colclasure said.

“Contractors are only going to mobilize if a unit is big enough,” Colclasure said. “They’re not going to mobilize for 40 acres. They might do it for 160 acres.”

That’s why connectivity among multiple landowners is so important.

“One solution is to pool landowners instead of the shotgun approach,” Colclasure said. “That’s why we try to work on concentrated areas around public land.”

One solution is to partner with rural volunteer fire departments to conduct controlled burns, Colclasure added.

You’ve just read the difference between now and 2016. Back then it was a wish. Today it’s action.

Keep going, and go bigger.