Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Quail's dwindling population has state in quandary

Saving the population would mean getting the land back to the way it was when they were plentiful.

By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published January 8, 2006

For most of the 20th century, the bird Florida hunters pursued most avidly was the Northern bobwhite quail. They killed more than 1-million a year in the 1970s.

But in the past 20 years Florida's quail population has crashed.

Experts believe the number of Florida quail has dropped by more than two-thirds, though they have taken no census. The number of Florida quail hunters has sharply declined, too.

Now, alarmed state officials are scrambling to stop the decline. They are mindful that this may be their only chance to save Florida's quail population - and to revive hunting, which brought the state $13-million from license fees last year.

"If we don't do something now it's going to be gone with the wind," said state wildlife commissioner Richard Corbett, a Tampa mall developer who frequently hunts quail on his Panhandle plantation.

Yet wildlife officials face a tricky problem: how to save a species so its biggest fans can still shoot at it.

So they are not pursuing one obvious approach: listing quail as a protected species, like such previously hunted species as panthers, manatees and bears.

When some ornithologists proposed just that, they ran into opposition from owners of large Panhandle plantations that cultivate quail for hunting.

"They were scared it would interfere with the hunting of their healthy populations," said Manley Fuller, president of the Florida Wildlife Federation, a pro-hunting environmental group. The plantation owners "feared they would have a bunch of (animal rights activists) filing lawsuits against them."

When the state failed to act on the Florida Ornithological Society petition, the ornithologists withdrew it. That was fine with state wildlife officials - even though they say the quail might meet the requirements for such protection.

"Some of the listing criteria would qualify the bobwhite," said Tommy Hines, who is in charge of small-game animal programs for the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "But we don't want it listed, and the plantation owners who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on quail wouldn't want them listed."

Ticking off the people who most want to help the quail, Hines explained, "would hurt more than it would help."

Every fall in Florida, quail hunters all across the state pull on their boots, load their shotguns and turn their dogs loose in the woods. The hunters wade through thick briars, trailing the dogs sniffing out the small, round birds.

A dog freezes, its tail stiff, its nose pointing toward the thicket where the quail are hiding. The hunters kick at the brush, flushing a dozen birds into the air, and blast away. The dogs fetch the wounded and the dead.

"When a covey of quail flush at your feet, it's the biggest rush you can imagine," said Nigel Miller of Punta Gorda, a quail hunter for 25 years.

Although hunters talk about the tradition of quail hunting as if it were as old as the country itself, experts say that in colonial times quail were sparse in the South. Then settlers came along and carved the primordial forest into a patchwork of farms and woods. Their alterations created ideal quail habitat, causing the population to boom.

By the 1920s quail hunting was so popular that Florida ecologist Herbert L. Stoddard pioneered the study of managing land to produce more quail. In 1931 he published the definitive book, The Bobwhite Quail: Its Habits, Preservation, and Increase. Stoddard, co-founder of Tall Timbers Research Station near Tallahassee, defined quail management as "creating a surplus to be harvested by the gun."

Quail-hunting season runs from November until March, and state regulations say hunters can kill a dozen birds a day. In the 1960s, quail hunters killed more than 2.5-million birds a year, state officials say.

Quail reproduce rapidly, nesting two or three times a season and laying up to 15 eggs each time, so no one fretted about killing so many. Now experts say that over the past 20 years, Florida's quail population was dropping by about 3 percent to 5 percent a year.

"Contrary to what we thought we knew, you can overharvest them fairly easily," said Hines of the wildlife commission.

By last year, Hines said, the number of quail shot by hunters was fewer than 250,000, a tenth what they killed annually in the 1960s. And some of those weren't even wild.

"I don't know of hardly anybody who kills wild birds anymore," said Florida Wildlife Federation vice president Preston Robertson. He said hunters frequently use coveys of pen-raised birds that are turned loose in the woods to be tracked down and shot.

To start reviving the quail population, Hines said, the state may have to require hunters to shoot fewer than the daily dozen now allowed, and perhaps tinker with the regulations in other ways.

But state wildlife officials primarily blame the quail's decline on the same thing that caused the population boom: human alteration of the landscape. Solving the problem, they say, will require persuading landowners to change it back.

At 75, Kate Ireland remembers how Florida looked back when the quail were abundant. There were plenty of farms and forests where hunters could turn the dogs loose. Fires ignited by lightning regularly burned the woods, leaving lots of native grasses for the quail to eat and build nests in.

But over time, Florida's wild places were turned into subdivisions and strip shopping centers.

"As people moved into quail territory, problems arose," said Ireland, owner of Foshalee Plantation near Tallahassee and chairwoman of the board overseeing the Tall Timbers Research Station.

In the remaining forests, wildfire was regarded as bad, so the authorities suppressed it. The forests became choked with tall undergrowth unsuitable for quail habitat.

"If we can't burn, then the whole state of Florida is not going to be able to have quail," Ireland said.

Some forests and farms were turned into orange groves. And ranchers who didn't sell their land to developers began replacing native grasses with exotic bahia grass, which quail can't tolerate.

Meanwhile, timber companies converted native longleaf pine forests into slash pine farms that turn a quicker profit. They planted the trees so close together that, even on sunny days, the forest floor was dark as night and bare of native grasses.

Reviving the quail population, experts say, will require reversing those trends. More animals than just the quail will benefit from regular burning in the woods, thinning out slash pine plantations and bringing back native grasses. Aiding the quail could also aid red-cockaded woodpeckers and the Florida scrub jays, both of which are protected species.

In October, state officials and Tall Timbers sponsored a seminar in Arcadia to show landowners how to attract quail to their property.

The following month, they held a similar session at Tall Timbers for the agencies that control 6-million acres of public land in Florida, such as the Division of Forestry. They say perhaps 1.5-million acres could be converted into quail habitat.

The state has budgeted $100,000 for the quail initiative, Corbett said, and will soon hire someone to work at Tall Timbers spearheading the drive to remake the Florida landscape, revive the quail population and bring back quail hunting.

"If we do nothing," Corbett said, "then in the next 15 or 20 years it will be gone."

Times staff researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report.

[Last modified January 8, 2006, 00:43:05]