00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. On this episode, I want to tell you about Bob white quail, a bird that once covered the entire North American continent in abundance, and the hunting culture centered completely around them that now has almost been completely forgotten. It's late January. I'm in North Mississippi, and the sound that you're hearing is me hiking through the woods. I've been at this all day with a new friend of mine and his dog. We're out hunting, but we're not here hunting deer. We're not here hunting ducks. We're not even here hunting squirrels. In fact, the few other hunters that we've crossed paths with today gave us odd looks when we told them what we were here after. 00:01:00 Speaker 2: What's the most cubes you found in today? You said, too, And both of them pretty sizeable cubies. 00:01:05 Speaker 1: You said, yeah, yeah, there's two covees in here. 00:01:09 Speaker 3: According to when I came in September. 00:01:11 Speaker 4: One was falling away that way here. 00:01:15 Speaker 2: I'm quite surprised we didn't push them because they usually well, we'll make a circle and come in the window. 00:01:20 Speaker 4: Be in our favor. 00:01:21 Speaker 5: Come. 00:01:22 Speaker 1: What we're hunting is bob white quail, an animal that is called this place, this state, this continent home since before any of us were alive on this earth. But unfortunately these days can be tough to find. Our mission today is simple, find wild quail. We're in an area where there still remains a huntable population. We hiked onward, following the dog through every thorn, bramble and cane thicket that she could find, until eventually she went on point, letting us know she had found a bird. 00:01:58 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Burdon, what. 00:02:00 Speaker 1: You're hearing now is us making a game plan as to how to approach the dog on point and flush the bird. This can be extremely tricky putting ourselves in position for a good shot, given the type of thickets these birds call home. This next part, flushing the bird, is almost unbearably suspensable. You don't know where it's gonna happen, you don't know when it's gonna happen. You just walk towards the dog, waiting for the forest floor to erupt under your feet, and you better be ready. 00:02:37 Speaker 2: Wow, that's my fault. That was more mesmerized with the bird than anything. I think. 00:02:46 Speaker 1: Wow, I stood there, motionless in awe of what I had just seen. A single quail exploded out of that sea of thorny vines, flew right over the top of my head, and disappeared back into the brush so quickly that the whole insie that became a memory quicker than I could even process the fact that I had missed. We both missed, and frankly, I don't think either of us cared. But here's the big picture of all this. Like I mentioned earlier, Bob white quail or native here. They've called this entire continent home for a long time. There's research that even has them on the landscape up to a million years ago. That means that Bob white quail were flying in Whistling the same time that Willie mammoths and ground slots were still roaming around. That is wild to me. And at one point, not too long ago, there was so many that we had an entire hunting culture built around them, and now in twenty twenty five, they've been reduced to a fraction of what once was. And I'm on a mission to find out why. The guy that's going to help us do that as someone you probably already know. His name is Will Primos, and he's been a dear friend and mentor for me for well over a decade. You and I both know Will for spring turkey hunting, elk white tails, but I never knew he got his start hunting with Bob white quail. I'm sitting in Will's office. The room is filled with countless celebrations of the outdoors, antler's hand carved duck decoys, paintings of wild turkeys, countless books. And I've had the pleasure of knowing Will for a long time. But I couldn't help but notice his enthusiasm today. I think he's excited to share this story. 00:04:27 Speaker 6: My uncle Gus was a devoted quail hunter. He had pointers and shutters, and I can still remember the setter. Her name was Cheyenne, and I got paid a quarter for school get up, and he lived like a real third of a mile away. 00:04:46 Speaker 4: You know, it wasn't very far, but I could get there on my bicycle. 00:04:49 Speaker 6: No, I would go over there, run over there and for a quorder. I got the cleaning dog pins and that started probably when I was about eight years old. 00:04:59 Speaker 1: Will's connection the quail and bird dogs started and he was just a boy in rural Mississippi in the nineteen fifties. Little did he know that this would start a fire that would burn for a lifetime. 00:05:08 Speaker 3: Here's more from Will about his uncle Gus. 00:05:12 Speaker 6: But his friend was Buck Deerman, and Buck Buck came a fast friend of mine. As I grew over, Buck and Gus would go quail hunting. 00:05:22 Speaker 4: And Madison County. 00:05:23 Speaker 6: Which is where we are right now, where I live, back then was a rural setting. Used to be big, huge cotton plantations, rolling cotton plantations. And back then what they did the crime was very fertile that had never been farm or anything. 00:05:39 Speaker 3: They clear it. 00:05:40 Speaker 6: They'd plant their crops, and when they depleted the nourishment of the soul. 00:05:42 Speaker 4: They didn't have furlizer stuff. 00:05:44 Speaker 6: They just go clear another patch of land and that other would grow up. And over the many, many decades and years, Madison County became small rural farm vegetable gardens and people who wanted to live in the country. 00:06:00 Speaker 4: Is everywhere, no posted signs. 00:06:03 Speaker 6: You just pulled up gut out of your car and it was just perfect quail habitat. 00:06:07 Speaker 4: I didn't know that at the time, I just thought that was normal. 00:06:11 Speaker 1: What Will just told us there is one of the most important parts of this entire story. It's really not even about quail. It's quail habitat. Remember that because that detail is going to become more relevant later on. 00:06:24 Speaker 6: But Buck was very long legged, and Gus was almost as long legged. And here this little kid is and just trying to keep up with them. But to see the dogs work, and they wouldn't let me carry a gun in those early years, but I got to be there and watch the dog's point, watch them shoot, and both of them shot browning automatics, you know, the old Belgian may Old hump back, you know. 00:06:47 Speaker 4: Anyway, my uncle Gust died a few years ago, but I. 00:06:50 Speaker 6: Remember in his home he had a beautiful den where he would entertain. He was a big business man. He had entertained and he had a portrait commission to portrait to be made of him kneeling down with his shotgun with cheyenne. 00:07:05 Speaker 1: I got a chance to see this painting, and frankly, it's incredible. A square jawed man with black hair wearing a khaki jacket knelt down with his bird dogs. And I couldn't help but notice how much of a resemblance it had to Will. 00:07:19 Speaker 3: I think this gives. 00:07:20 Speaker 1: Us a really clear picture into how important and valued quail and quail hunting was at the time. 00:07:26 Speaker 3: I mean, think about it. 00:07:27 Speaker 1: How many people do you know these days that commission a painter to do a portrait of their duck, dog or a deer that they shot. Bob White quail meant something to these people. But what really sticks out to me is the background of this painting. It looks nothing like what Madison County, Mississippi looks like today. 00:07:46 Speaker 4: Today. 00:07:46 Speaker 1: It's neighborhoods, business parks, pine plantations. Whether he meant to or not, Will showing us this painting gave us one of the most crucial pieces to this quail puzzle, its habitat. I now want to hear from a biologist to give us more on this quail story. Mark McConnell is an upland bird professor at Mississippi State University. He starts off by talking about Tall Timbers. FYI, this is one of the nation's largest quail research centers located in South Georgia. 00:08:15 Speaker 7: Some of the early research I know you know about Tall Timbers Research Station, Well, that research station was started as a response to quail decline even in that part of the world. 00:08:25 Speaker 3: Right that book right. 00:08:26 Speaker 7: There on my desk, right next to you, that's considered like the quail Bible. It was like the first really robust study of Bob White. They started that study. They published in nineteen thirty one, but they started it, you know, several years before. 00:08:37 Speaker 1: That nineteen thirty one, so they were already seeing declines in nineteen thirty one. 00:08:42 Speaker 3: They were seeing declines in the late eighteen nineties. 00:08:44 Speaker 4: Oh wow, I did not know that. 00:08:46 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:08:46 Speaker 7: You hear a lot of people say, oh, they've been declined since the sixties. The longason we say that is because the Breeding Bird Survey started in nineteen sixty six, So that's the first documented decline. 00:08:57 Speaker 1: The eighteen nineties. Will was just telling us these incredible quail hunting stories from Mississippi in the nineteen fifties. Now Mark's telling us the decline started sixty years earlier than that. 00:09:08 Speaker 4: I can't keep up. 00:09:09 Speaker 1: I want to ask Mark about quail declines in densities. 00:09:14 Speaker 7: And there's a fair amount of reasons for that. If you think about what was going on in the country and kind of some of the industrial nature of things. Herbert Stoddard said at the time that he thought a bird per acre was as good as you could ever get, and then they found out through time and tall timbers is a great example of this. You absolutely can get more than a bird breaker. There are there are places in the Red Hills that can hit a bird and a half two birds breaker. Now you don't stay there forever. You know, populations nothing goes up forever, right, but you can absolutely exceed that density to barying degrees. People would wet their pants over bird p Yeah, Mississippi. So kind of the story of Quail. If he started with thirty thousand foot view, the entire landscape change everything we did. The landscape, with very few exceptions, wasn't designed to mess up Quail, but it certainly messed up Quail. Think about, say, let's go eighteen ninety nineteen hundred somewhere in that pre World War One, think about what the landscape would have looked like. We did not have the Green Revolution of agriculture. Yet, we didn't have fescue yet. Oh the tall fescue. It's an exotic forage grass that we brought over to stabilize soil and it's a great winter forage because it's a cool season grass. It's a very challenging plant for quail management. So we know it was before Bermuda grass, it was before behaya grass. It was before all these exotic forage grasses took over grazing and forage production. It was before we were farming loblolly pine trees like road crops. That's about the time we kind of the national US policy was pretty much anti fire. 00:10:53 Speaker 3: Fire was a bad thing, right. 00:10:55 Speaker 7: So you've got industrialization, you've got expansion, you've got all these things happening over the next several years, and it just it all kind of just came together and congealed to just create a landscape where quail could not exist at high densities. 00:11:08 Speaker 1: That's one thing that it's interesting as I've done some of this digging and some of this research, is I'm thirty two years old. You take someone a little bit younger than me that grew up and let's just say Mississippi because is where we're at, but this could be applied to a lot of much of the Southeast. You take someone that's just a little bit younger than me, then a state of Mississippi that is virtually completely dominated by law Volley pine plantation lines. And to them, that's normal, that's Mississippi, that's our forest composition, that's what the state looks like. And what's wild is you really don't have to go that far back before it was wildly different. It's clear that the landscape changed in the United States dramatically in the nineteen hundreds, but why. 00:11:55 Speaker 7: You had the dust Bowl era and then you had all these conservation type approaches, but most of them were planning, you know, exotic grass to stabilize the soil, which you know, had a kind of initial Ooh, there's grass. 00:12:06 Speaker 3: Then I was like, oh god, it's bad grass, and. 00:12:08 Speaker 7: We kind of regretted it. And then right as you're ramping up in the sixties at the Green Revolution, we figured out, hey, corn is super limited on nitrogen. If we pour nitrogen into it, we could you know, double yields. Then we figured out synthetic herbicide, synthetic fertilizer, and then the Earl Betts, who was the Secretary of Agriculture after the Russian Week crisis, said hey, get bigger, get out in terms of agricultural farm detro to ditro. That was that was a statement from the Secretary of Agriculture in the United States. 00:12:34 Speaker 5: The Case State Radio Network presents an address by the Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, doctor Earl Buttons. We must learn in this next generation how to feed is many more people as we have learned to feed since the dawn of history. And do it at a time when there is no new western hemisphere to discover, when are no more prairies gods to flow, when the are no more virgin timber on arable land cut down? Do it at a time when we're losing arable and to the urban sprawl to highways. What's the ingridy we're going to put in to agriculture then to get this job done, science brain polom professional leadership for our scientists battle with mother Nature. 00:13:28 Speaker 1: Earl Butts was the United States Secretary of Agriculture from nineteen seventy one to nineteen seventy six. During his time in this role, Butts drastically changed agriculture policy, which had significant impacts on the country's landscape. Some of his more notable acts include getting rid of a program that paid farmers to not plant all of their land and saying things like get big or get out and plant fence road to fence row. All of these things carry a synonymous message of urging and incentivizing more land being put into production. Doctor Mark McConnell has more thoughts on. 00:14:01 Speaker 3: This and that expanded ag. 00:14:04 Speaker 7: So I think you hear a lot of old timers talked about, Oh yeah, we used to go had a covey over here. We'd go hunt down the fence row when we were kids, go find a fence row. Nowadays there are no fence rows right, and what fence rows are left, they've got round up, or they're we'd eeded, you know whatever, they're clean. So we took all the fenceros out. Then we realized we got bigger, So the combines got bigger, and the equipment got bigger. So now you got a twenty four row planner when everybody was playing four row planner. 00:14:28 Speaker 3: So the fields got bigger. 00:14:30 Speaker 7: And as we expanded fields, we took out those margins, those areas, those odd areas, they probably weren't the best ground. But then maybe a separated of a fence line or property boundary. That's where people were finding quailed in the sixties in Mississippi. I've talked to old timers who were still hunting them pretty hard up into the early eighties, and they said, right about the early eighties they were like, a R. 00:14:49 Speaker 3: We're not gonna We're not gonna buy a new bird dog. 00:14:52 Speaker 1: I was talking to I was interviewing James Martin, but he said they were on their last bird. And I said, dude, that sounds. 00:14:58 Speaker 3: Like the title to the very in country song. 00:15:01 Speaker 4: Like that's a country song. 00:15:02 Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, on my last that would be depressing. But somebody should write that. 00:15:06 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:15:09 Speaker 1: I can hear the tune in my head right now. Man, that sounds like a Muscadine bloodline song just waiting to be written. Mark and I are joking here, but many of us have fathers or grandfathers that have stories similar to this that were very real experiences for them. Think back to Will's uncle and his dog Shyenne. I even have a picture of my own grandfather with his English pointer when he was in his early thirties quail hunting in Webster County, Mississippi. 00:15:34 Speaker 4: Those days are gone now. 00:15:36 Speaker 1: If a fellow was driving around Mississippi these days with an English pointer, he would catch more than a few odd looks, and that is sad to me, but there is hope. Wilber Primo's is one of the guys that's doing something to get quail back on the landscape. You are one of the first people that I can remember that back when you had Rivers Run, you were doing things on that property to promote Bob Whaite quail. 00:16:04 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:16:04 Speaker 6: I love conservation and love trying to understand what we did wrong and what caused some of these things not to go the way they could have to keep the tradition alive, and there's some people that are restoring them well. First off, a lot of it was roa crop. It was marginal rocrop, dry ground farming. It was not profitable, and so when I bought it again, looked at I said, what's the. 00:16:25 Speaker 4: Better use for this land? 00:16:28 Speaker 6: And I met with ended up meeting a guy named Nick Thomas who founded the company cost Stewart Link that puts controvation on the ground helps represent the growers to NRCS at FSA offices. I met with him and said, look, can I put this back into some type of quail habitat. He said, yeah, we planting warm season native grasses and we've got experts that'll help show you how to get ready, how to get the ground prepared, how to it'll take you over a year to get this going and get it planted. There's so much to learn. You got to have the right kind of planner. You got to choose the different grasses that were native to Mississippi. So I ended up with blue stem and Indian grass and gamma grass. 00:17:11 Speaker 4: I mean, it was, it was done. We had a few quail. 00:17:14 Speaker 6: You'd be on deer standing, you'd see you'd hear the quail, or you see them walk by. 00:17:18 Speaker 2: I remember that. 00:17:19 Speaker 4: Yeah, I was. 00:17:20 Speaker 1: Yeah, I was amazed. I hadn't seen it. That's the first time I was Probably that was I would have been twenty two years old. Yeah, and I don't think I had seen a quail since I was like twelve. 00:17:30 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:17:30 Speaker 1: When I saw those rivers running, I was amazed. 00:17:32 Speaker 4: And they walked by the edge of the woods. 00:17:34 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:17:34 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:17:34 Speaker 6: And so when we did the grass and we gave them the habitat, I mean exploded. So the most fun for me was in the spring to step outside and to see how many males I could count singing. It never count. There's one, there's one, there's one. I think my highest I ever got to it was thirteen. Yeah. 00:17:54 Speaker 4: Oh it was really cool. Yeah, because you got to burn. You can't burn too much. You burn too often and gets too thick. It's too thick. That's not good. You know. Quail need to be able to run around on the ground. They got to run. 00:18:05 Speaker 6: Between the clumps of grasses. They got to have escape cover. I planted plums, thickets, I planted. I tried to do everything I could. 00:18:13 Speaker 4: It was fun. 00:18:14 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:18:14 Speaker 1: What do you think the biggest hurdle is? You know, because I was talking to start to several folks about this, and it's like one of the biggest things that they think quail faced, just talking about specifically here at home in the Southeast, is that in order, because we talked about you have to be there almost has to be an intentionality about it. These days, if you're gonna have quail on a property and so to do that, you have to have people landowners, hunters that are interested in it. And that's kind of a tall order right now, because there's not too many places that someone could go and find quail. There's not too many places someone could go and find a good bird dog because you don't see too many people down here riding around with setters and pointers anymore. There's just they're gone for the most part. 00:19:01 Speaker 4: That's right. When you lose the resource, you lose a lot that goes with it. 00:19:08 Speaker 1: If you think about it, and I can get most upland hunters, can you romanticize about it? We all can we just lose a bird? We lost in entire hunting culture. And I liking it now because spring turkey hunting or duck hunting, or deer. 00:19:23 Speaker 3: Hunting, whatever. And I tell folks, imagine it was gone. 00:19:26 Speaker 1: All of it's Goneine, if you take like, think about deer hunt. Let's talk about deer. But if you take away the deer, then the deer hunt's gone. What else is gone? 00:19:35 Speaker 3: Deer camp, deer camp. 00:19:36 Speaker 1: Deer you weekends at deer camp, watching the football game and grilling out. 00:19:39 Speaker 3: That's gone now. 00:19:40 Speaker 1: Stories of you telling your buddies, checking your trail cameras all the time, It's all gone. I'm interested in how wildlife affects humans and human culture. And although much of it is gone now, coil used to dominate the hunting culture of the Southeast, much like deer camps dominate the hunting culture now. 00:19:58 Speaker 3: It was a different world. 00:19:59 Speaker 7: True. 00:20:00 Speaker 1: Here's Will on how he and his family used to celebrate quail season. 00:20:07 Speaker 6: They were a good many of guys like that, and they would have dinners over at Guss's house after season that have a big quail dinner, and by all of their friends that do it. I don't know how prevalent it was. You hear a lot of people that you meet today. I'm in my seventies and you hear a lot of people talk about, you know, their daddies and that are my age. So you know, we're almost one generation past it because it was the generation before me that had the quantity and the quality and had that opportunity. 00:20:41 Speaker 1: I don't know about y'all, but I would give an awful lot to be able to go back in time and attend one of those quail dinners at Will's uncle's house. And while I could continue on about the plight of the Bob White quail and the long lost hunting culture, I think it's important to point out that there is a silver lining here. In the past ten years, there's resurgence not just in quail, but in people people like you, people like me, people with an interest in quail, quail habitat and quail hunting. 00:21:13 Speaker 7: It's a different landscape, but where people are trying, they've got quit. That's kind of the resounding message of hope is if you've got them, and you've got some acreage, and you've got some buddiest next to you, that will help out. 00:21:24 Speaker 3: There's a lot of things you can do to. 00:21:25 Speaker 7: Keep everyone talks about and it is. That's a terribly depressing story of the quail. It really is. But the longer I've been doing this, I'm like, you know what, Yeah, it's depressing, but it's also pretty inspiring the fact that I like I can go to Rankin County. I did a site visit in Ranking County with John Mark Curtis, our quil Forever state biologist. We did a site visit got two years ago now and the guy had some pines, not many, couple hundred acres he was burning them with then them His neighbor had a tornado come through. I think it was a hardwood stand and just ripped it and es salvaged. It was like a nice little clear cut. There were quails singing everywhere in Rankin County, not far off major highway. And we're driving back and he said something pretty cool. He's like, you know, just about anywhere in this state, if people try, they can get quail. 00:22:11 Speaker 3: Now, they're not going to get a bird break. 00:22:13 Speaker 7: But this guy, I think he texts John Mark earlier or last late last year saying, oh, yeah, went out hunting with the bird, you know, the dog and found a few covees. 00:22:21 Speaker 3: You know, he was elated. He could not have been happier. And he wasn't doing anything all that unique anymore. I mean, he's just then his pies and was lighting fires every two years. 00:22:31 Speaker 1: So you're basically saying that the narrative of the Bob White quail here in the Southeast, rather than the plight. 00:22:39 Speaker 4: Of the Bob White. 00:22:40 Speaker 1: Quail, it should be more of like, look at this bird that refuses to give up. 00:22:44 Speaker 4: That's right. 00:22:44 Speaker 3: The resilience of Bob White to hang on. 00:22:47 Speaker 7: Now they've been locally exportrated from or you know, there's areas where you're not going to find them whatever, there's plenty of that. So the story that I like to focus on, Now, yes, we need to teach the historical demise, but the fact that these things are still around with everything we put against them, I mean, it's amazing. 00:23:10 Speaker 1: A bird that just won't give up. Now that's a story I can get behind. So let's take a quick look back at what we learned this week. Bob Whack quail have been kicking around on this continent for roughly a million years, meaning they crossed paths with and outlasted animals like the wooly mammoth and the groundsloth. I still think that's wild. We used to have them in great abundance until the first notable declines in the eighteen nineties. However, quail populations and quail hunting remained good up into the nineteen fifties and sixties, and then, due to multiple factors such as agricultural expansion, urban sprawl, habitat loss, and many others, quail declines got worse. But like we just mentioned, this bird just refuses to quit. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this Country Life, and I want to give a big shout out to Onyx Hunt for making this podcast possible. Next time, we're gonna learn what the future of Bob White Quayle could look like and what people like you and me can do to help keep them around