What's Killing Quail...

[bossman]

Found this very interesting in this morning's Dallas Morning News sports section under outdoors... Hope the link works.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... 0db39.html

[ezzy333]

Interesting article. Hope there is further study of that so if we can identify using corn as bait as a problem it can be stopped. I would like to see it stopped whether it is or not but I know a lot of people think it is fine and I am sure the area you are in makes a difference in how you feel about it. But if it is hurting the other wildlife then we need to stop it or find something else to use. We need more information.

Ezzy

[bossman]

Ezzy...Your right about the State of Texas. Using feeders with corn and hunting out of a "blind" is s.o.p in Texas. If there can be more research done on this subject, conservation organizations might need to change their emphasis from creating more habitat to using black eyed peas or other "bait" in deer feeders. I'm afraid that here in Texas, it might we easier to get Jerry Jones to move the Cowboys back to the old stadium. It just ring's true to me. On our lease in Northwest Texas, heard and saw lot's of birds in July, and August..Disappered in Oct and Nov...The deer hunters start feeding around Labor Day. Not criticizing the deer hunter's. I've got two nice buck's on the wall over the computer as I type..The business of "game management" is just changing.. Anyway, the lack of birds or greatly reduced number of birds, for whatever reason, in Texas this year has been discouraging..Especially when you think you've got semi-good, sorta-ok bird dogs..Nuff said, have two weeks left in the season, will probably go back to Kansas in March to our favorite controlled area and then start working on next year.

[luke0927]

Well here in GA the big thing is farming practices, and predator control. example....

I lease 400 acres in south GA. a mix of peanut and soybean farm. fields are planted tree line to tree line and round up sprayed. every now and then the year before I would jump a covey on a road in the thick pines but you could never hunt it with a dog just luck. This past year the farmers got a bad batch of round up or what ever pesticide they are using....the filed grew up in a lot of weeds and then there were insects along with that. Well what do you know starting finding a couple coveys hanging around on the field. They had cover in the weeds, seed from the weeds and the insects. Now only problem is the farmer lost a lot of money cause of this and his number one priority is to make a living and you can't blame him.

A better solutions i to bring back some type of hedge row or divider or leave a strip of natural grow around the fields or between them.. Most people are planting lob-lolly pines and not longleaf which can be burned a lot more, need the burning and disking and more native vegetation (rag weed, saw grass etc...) Also hardly anyone traps so lots of nest raiding varmits, as well as no control on aviary predators. ( when hunting planted birds you should see how fast they come in)

[birddog1968]

They disapeared so completely and so widespread it had to be an ag chemical and the farming practices those
chemicals ushered in. glypsophate and atrazine would be good places to start looking.

Older guys here will tell you quail cant even find water that isnt saturated with these farm chemicals......

[birddogger]

Here in Illinois, the birds have been scarce for alot of years now. Most of the people that I talk to blame it on predators, such as the huge number of coyotes, which at one time, were nonexistent here. While I believe there is more than one reason for the diminishing quail population, I have always believed that modern farming practices have more to do with it than anything else.

They till the ground from fence line to fence line, leaving no cover, and the farming practices today are so efficient that there is no grain left in the fields after harvest. I still see places where there is plenty of cover, but no birds because of the effiency of the harvest.

I believe that if there is plenty of cover and food, there will be quail. I can't or don't blame farmers, they are just trying to make the best use of their ground as possible. They have to make a living too. Just saying.

Charlie

[luke0927]

Tall Timbers does a lot of research here are some videos they had set up on nest and you can see all the raiders

http://www.talltimbers.org/gb-nestvideo.html

[Greg Jennings]

Some ideas here:

http://www.ag.auburn.edu/aaes/communica ... index.html

[ezzy333]

The original post sounded plausible about the aflotoxin except for the fact that the only time we really see it is ona dry year where the corn stalk actually dies befor ethe grain is dry and the aflotixin starts in the kernel because the moisture is not being pulled out through the stalk. Most years there is vey little of it in the midwest at least. Maybe that isn't true of the Texas area.

Ezzy

[big steve46]

Here in Illinois, the birds have been scarce for alot of years now. Most of the people that I talk to blame it on predators, such as the huge number of coyotes, which at one time, were nonexistent here. While I believe there is more than one reason for the diminishing quail population, I have always believed that modern farming practices have more to do with it than anything else.

They till the ground from fence line to fence line, leaving no cover, and the farming practices today are so efficient that there is no grain left in the fields after harvest. I still see places where there is plenty of cover, but no birds because of the effiency of the harvest.

I believe that if there is plenty of cover and food, there will be quail. I can't or don't blame farmers, they are just trying to make the best use of their ground as possible. They have to make a living too. Just saying.

Charlie

I live about 90 miles SE of you, and I pretty much agree. Farm chemicals and better equipment that leaves less grain are factors. Fewer fencerows are also factors. We do have plenty of cover here though.

The big change here is the big increase of predators in the last 25 years. Nest robbers such as raccoons, skunks, possums, etc plus hawks and coyotes have all gotten worse. There are quail here, but they are in denser cover for self-preservation. I'd say from many years of experience, it's 60/40 with 60% of it with predation. You have to understand that most of the research emphasizes habitat loss because that's what they are paid to research. Other parts of the country may be different.

[zzweims]

I believe that there is no one culprit. Farming practices, urbanization, predators, chemicals, loss of share-cropping, etc. all play a part. Here in central Georgia, one of the 'culprits' was the timber industry. Huge swaths of wall-to-wall pine, planted so densely that the sun couldn't reach the ground. A few years ago, Weyerhauser clearcut nearly a million acres, then left the area. We've since had a mini-boom in the quail population

Aline
http://zzfarms.com

[birddogger]

Here in Illinois, the birds have been scarce for alot of years now. Most of the people that I talk to blame it on predators, such as the huge number of coyotes, which at one time, were nonexistent here. While I believe there is more than one reason for the diminishing quail population, I have always believed that modern farming practices have more to do with it than anything else.

They till the ground from fence line to fence line, leaving no cover, and the farming practices today are so efficient that there is no grain left in the fields after harvest. I still see places where there is plenty of cover, but no birds because of the effiency of the harvest.

I believe that if there is plenty of cover and food, there will be quail. I can't or don't blame farmers, they are just trying to make the best use of their ground as possible. They have to make a living too. Just saying.

Charlie

I live about 90 miles SE of you, and I pretty much agree. Farm chemicals and better equipment that leaves less grain are factors. Fewer fencerows are also factors. We do have plenty of cover here though.

The big change here is the big increase of predators in the last 25 years. Nest robbers such as raccoons, skunks, possums, etc plus hawks and coyotes have all gotten worse. There are quail here, but they are in denser cover for self-preservation. I'd say from many years of experience, it's 60/40 with 60% of it with predation. You have to understand that most of the research emphasizes habitat loss because that's what they are paid to research. Other parts of the country may be different.

Good point. Predators may well be the biggest factor. We still have some birds here too, just scarce. When I got into bird hunting, in the 60's and 70's, quail hunting was awesome, just find cover and food and get permission to hunt it, which was not hard. God I miss it!!!

Charlie

[birddog1968]

I have a hard time believing the predator reason.......might be the case elsewhere.

Quail disappeared from the entire Mid-Atlantic region and beyond in a very short amount of time.
In that amount of time nothing predator wise had changed.......farming practices on the other hand
changed dramatically.

The few small covies I know of now are completely divorced from ag areas.

Harder to raise chicks in areas devoid of insects because of pesticides and engineered crops.

[ezzy333]

There has been a major change that effected the whole country and that is low fur prices. When the prices went down people stopped trapping and the predators doubled, tripled, and more. Fur prices and birds of prey protection has caused the over abundance of both.

Chemicals are being mentioned by several but I don't think you can find much effect directly but they have eliminated most of the weeds and that was and is a major source of feed for quail as well as other birds. It still comes down to habitat and every point that has been mentioned either directly or indirectly has an effect. But what do we do about it? Thats the tough question that does not seem to have an answer.

Ezzy

[birddog1968]

i watched a report about grain farming and its impacts on wildlife. The region they used was the Prairie Pothole region.


The effect of chemicals such as atrazine on the food chain was dramatic, some may even say shameful. To think these powerful
Chemicals have little or no effect on an animal the size of quail is unthinkable. Whether its the only cause I will not debate, but I strongly feel our ag practices and the powerful chemicals it uses are a major factor. (do some research on frogs vs. the zines family of chemicals) paraquat is another.....imagine quail young and old who's environment was just hosed down with paraquat....not much imagination needed.

Quail survived eons with predators from one end of this country to the other....yet where Quail disappeared in totality happened right along side agriculture (both grain and livetock). They disappeared between 81 and 85 ,from this area, completely. Do those dates coincide with the fall of pelt prices?

ps...when i say this area, i mean a 6 to 7 state area.....

One of the places where quail are still found in numbers here are beach dunes, very little to eat, sparce cover and lots of predators....but no ag chemicals.If anyone could offer a hypothisis on why the only place they are found here is also about the most inhospitable place for them? im all ears.

[tn red]

Has anyone done any research on the impact of turkey on quail nesting? I've always heard that the turkey break up the quail nests and the rise of the turkey seems to coincide with the demise of the quail.
I agree with the predator theroy but why then do the predators not seem to impact the turkey population? This is the case in the southeast.

[birddogger]

We have probably all heard the turkey theory, but I don't think it has been proven. Correct me if I am wrong.

Charlie

[ezzy333]

i watched a report about grain farming and its impacts on wildlife. The region they used was the Prairie Pothole region.


The effect of chemicals such as atrazine on the food chain was dramatic, some may even say shameful. To think these powerful
Chemicals have little or no effect on an animal the size of quail is unthinkable. Whether its the only cause I will not debate, but I strongly feel our ag practices and the powerful chemicals it uses are a major factor. (do some research on frogs vs. the zines family of chemicals) paraquat is another.....imagine quail young and old who's environment was just hosed down with paraquat....not much imagination needed.

Quail survived eons with predators from one end of this country to the other....yet where Quail disappeared in totality happened right along side agriculture (both grain and livetock). They disappeared between 81 and 85 ,from this area, completely. Do those dates coincide with the fall of pelt prices?

ps...when i say this area, i mean a 6 to 7 state area.....

One of the places where quail are still found in numbers here are beach dunes, very little to eat, sparce cover and lots of predators....but no ag chemicals.If anyone could offer a hypothisis on why the only place they are found here is also about the most inhospitable place for them? im all ears.

You are talking about chemicals that haven't been used for years. Our quail disappeared the year we had 44 inches of snow on the ground. We had been using chemicals way way before the big snows of the 70's and 80's and we still had birds. I am not trying to say that chemicals couldn't have an effect, but just trying to explain what the chemicals we have used do and how that effects the birds habitat.


Ezzy

[birddog1968]

i watched a report about grain farming and its impacts on wildlife. The region they used was the Prairie Pothole region.


The effect of chemicals such as atrazine on the food chain was dramatic, some may even say shameful. To think these powerful
Chemicals have little or no effect on an animal the size of quail is unthinkable. Whether its the only cause I will not debate, but I strongly feel our ag practices and the powerful chemicals it uses are a major factor. (do some research on frogs vs. the zines family of chemicals) paraquat is another.....imagine quail young and old who's environment was just hosed down with paraquat....not much imagination needed.

Quail survived eons with predators from one end of this country to the other....yet where Quail disappeared in totality happened right along side agriculture (both grain and livetock). They disappeared between 81 and 85 ,from this area, completely. Do those dates coincide with the fall of pelt prices?

ps...when i say this area, i mean a 6 to 7 state area.....

One of the places where quail are still found in numbers here are beach dunes, very little to eat, sparce cover and lots of predators....but no ag chemicals.If anyone could offer a hypothisis on why the only place they are found here is also about the most inhospitable place for them? im all ears.

You are talking about chemicals that haven't been used for years. Our quail disappeared the year we had 44 inches of snow on the ground. We had been using chemicals way way before the big snows of the 70's and 80's and we still had birds. I am not trying to say that chemicals couldn't have an effect, but just trying to explain what the chemicals we have used do and how that effects the birds habitat.


Ezzy

Atrazine and graxomone (paraquat) are used plenty.....how you figure they arent used anymore?

Glypsphate while low toxicity, has done more to change habitat than any chemical.......

http://www.atrazine.com/AtraMain.aspx

http://www.syngenta.com/en/products_bra ... _page.html

[winchestermodel50]

I believe 1962 was the last year it was legal to shoot hawks and owls in Kansas. We used to have a tremendous quail and jackrabbit population. In 1972, after 10 years of federal protection, everyone wanted to know why the jackrabbits were nearly eradicated. In 1982 everyone wanted to know why all the quail disappeared. In the late 80's, CRP programs came into placement and the sparse new fields had a lot of weed growth generating flowers and insects. I have been told that chicks survive their first 30 days of life almost solely on insects. We had a resurgence of quail around these new CRP plots that generated quail numbers unprecedented in the state. After about 5 or 6 years these fields grew in densely, choking out the weed and therefore flower producing and insect attracting vegetation and the fields became sterile to the young birds. The states quail population plummeted to never before seen lows and has not recovered since, to anything beyond spotty recoveries.
I travel in parts of the state where I hunted as a young man and the farm practice in some of these areas are unchanged with the exception of the use of chemicals. Small varmints are much more plentiful today than they were when I was young, but I don't think they have much influence on bird populations. I had a covey of over a dozen quail in a milo field West of my house this fall prior to a snowstorm. During the week following the snow I noted 2 Cooper hawks working my pasture. In a weeks time they reduced the covey to 4 birds. Now, there are none.

I believe that farm practice is the biggest reason so few chicks are being produced. Herbicides and insecticides are depleting weeds and insects, possibly nearly eradicating some insect species crucial in the chick factory chain. The large hawks are absolutely the demise of jackrabbits, I think large hawks have very little to do with reduced quail populations. The smaller hawks are devastating on quail populations as there is no food on earth they prefer. If you don't believe me, put up a johnny box in a pasture full of meadowlarks. I have never seen a hawk of any kind make a pass at a meadowlark, but I have never seen a hawk of any kind pass up an opportunity at a quail. The smaller hawks are just so much more successful at it and the larger hawks though mostly unsuccessful, will not pass up an opportunity to mercilessly harass or apply constant pressure on the quail. Throw in the upturn in furbearers and turkeys eating chicks when they are lined up forcing insects into the corner of a field for a buffet, and the quail is just under too much pressure. Hawks and clean fields are the demise of quail.

[lvrgsp]

One of the places where quail are still found in numbers here are beach dunes, very little to eat, sparce cover and lots of predators....but no ag chemicals.If anyone could offer a hypothisis on why the only place they are found here is also about the most inhospitable place for them? im all ears.

Hey Dog, I think it is because of the margaritas and all the Jimmy Buffet music my man.......

Winchester.....I agree 100% very nice post...

[birddog1968]

Riiiiiight Lvr


Strikes me as funny they have a stronghold there, full of predators and devoid of farms as well as very little fresh water.

[A/C Guy]

There has been a major change that effected the whole country and that is low fur prices. When the prices went down people stopped trapping and the predators doubled, tripled, and more. Fur prices and birds of prey protection has caused the over abundance of both.

That is especially true here in Az. Our quail habitat has changed very little. But the coyote populations have exploded in the past decade. Where you have lots of coyotes, you get very few game birds and rabbits. We have seen that firsthand.

We had 7 large covey of quail on our property last summer. About a dozen coyotes have moved in our neighborhood and now we have 1 small covey of 6 quail. Last week, our neighbor trapped 2 coyotes and 1 bobcat that were raiding his chicken coup. Now that we have been taking our new litter outside during the day for exercise, we have heard the coyotes outside our house at night. The coyotes are getting bolder as they become more desperate for food.

[mikebill11]

I work for an agriculture testing lab. We mainly run nutritional analysis on animal feed. Cattle feed in particular. We have been running a lot of toxin test this year including afflatoxin. In my head if its bad for cattle it is probably bad for deer and other wildlife. Thanks for making this article available so hunters and wildlife lovers will be aware of this problem.

[bossman]

Mike..Thanks for looking at it. We all need to be doing something..But what??