The Call Back

If you go out into the places shunned by the masses, away from where concrete and creeping subdivisions and fast food chains and shopping malls sprout, into the pockets of southern farmland still planted in crops, where there are scattered blocks of pine and hardwood fringing the sandy loam fields, you can hear them on a late spring morning or a fall afternoon. You see them running at the edges of the dirt roads from which they dive back into the brushy cover of briars. But even here, where once they were as plentiful as the stars, they are rare enough that one stops to take note of their iconic call.

               It happened to me recently. When April rolls around, I begin fertilizing pecan trees via fertigation, which is a fancy term for pumping your fertilizer through the irrigation lines. It is highly efficient and cheaper than traditional forms of fertilization because you only fertilize the small area around each tree where the sprinklers throw their water. As the fertilizer is being metered out into the lines, I remain nearby to watch the tank level drop and make sure all goes smoothly. During this time, I take the opportunity to soak up the life of the world going on around me. It was on such a day that I heard once again the rich, piercing whistle announce, “bob-bob-why-eat”.

I mimicked the call, and he answered back, again and again. We established conversation in a language familiar to me, yet one I do not understand. Once a month, as I fertilized the trees through the summer, we kept up our conversation. I have heard stories of old men who could call the birds up like a turkey, but I lack that level of expertise. It is enough for me to simply share in the conversation amid the green beauty of the growing season. It is a comfort to know they are here.

If there ever were a bird with which someone like me can relate, it is the bobwhite quail. We don’t care much for places with a high density of human beings, nor for an excess of concrete, nor even for vast, unbroken fields. We like diversity in a landscape. We like open pine stands and pecan orchards fat with clover. Small fields, and old grown up fence-rows.

Bobwhite quail are the touchstone of my youth. They are the sentinels of a different time. Old men tell stories of their abundance and the pleasures they brought. Of how a man could come home from work, turn his dogs out and find two or three coveys in the hedgerows before supper. I never saw it. I was born 15 years or so too late. But I saw the last fading remnants of what was left of those times. They are no more.

Today, most people are familiar only with a form of quail hunting that I recognize as an impoverished, artificial version that I can’t relate to, in which, prior to hunting parties going out into the field, pen-raised quail are placed at strategic locations along a hunting course. The dogs find the birds and as they are flushed, one practically has to reach down, pick the bird up, and throw it to get it to fly. I tried this a few times over the years after our quail hunting petered out but it’s more like quail shooting than quail hunting and I found I just didn’t have the stomach for it. I still get invited three or four times each winter to go quail “shooting”. I appreciate the invitations but I turn them all down. Its fine for some I suppose, but to me, it cheapens the experience and memories that I made afield with this bird. Its not how I want to remember the bobwhite quail.

I don’t mean to discredit the commercial quail preserves for the services they provide. They protect a lot of valuable wildlife habitat that would otherwise not exist. There’s certainly a place for them. Additionally, commercial preserves allow many people who don’t own land the opportunity to have the experience of hunting quail and it is well worth the money they spend in that case. For that matter, “put-out birds” also provide a wonderful service for those who simply enjoy the experience of working with sporting dogs.

But, many hunters who frequent commercial quail plantations and preserves own some land of their own. They pay thousands of dollars to spend a couple days shooting pen-raised birds with their buddies and trying to have an experience that one could have for free a few decades ago. For these individuals, perhaps that money could be better spent elsewhere. If landowners used this money to make their own land suitable for birds, perhaps they could have the experience of hunting wild quail on their own land and improve conditions for the bird itself. There are a host of incentive programs out there, which will help cost share the expense. Sure, it will take a little extra work and you may have to relinquish a small fraction of crop land edge, but nothing worth having comes without a price.

In some places, rich folks can still hunt wild birds off wagons and horses. I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited along to do this too, but neither is that the quail hunting that I know. I grew up walking the land from morning to evening, following bird dogs through thick briars, where my hands became marbled with tiny, red cuts, all for that one moment when we would find a dog stopped as motionless as a fencepost, with its tail held straight and high. Why shouldn’t the average person have this anymore? Is protecting a species like the bobwhite only on massive, 80,000 acre plantations, with supplemental feeding and constant predator control, really the only way? Is this the kind of conservation we need?

I grew up with wild birds, however decayed their populations may have been at the time, and I feel they deserve more. I long to see the return of the bobwhite quail to the southland in a genuine way that befits its iconic image. I’d like to see it thriving in the rural farmland of the south just as the deer and turkey do now. I’d like to see them on the small landholdings of the common man as well as on the big plantations of the wealthy. But what does that require?

The language of dog work in quail hunting is its own form of poetry. The dogs love what they are doing and they thrive on the encouragement and instruction of the handler. I first heard the music of bird dog work while following behind my Uncle Bill and his two raw-boned pointers, Buck and Molly in the early 1980s. The air was filled with a language and cadence that came to feel as natural as anything I’d known. “Find ‘em”, “Close in here!”, “Care-fuuul!”, “Whoa!”, “Daaaay-ud, Daaaay-ud, Dead bird, Daaaay-ud”. Constant communication between the handler and the dogs forms a true partnership. It lets them share in each other’s excitement and keeps the dogs interested.

Talking to your bird dogs is not something you do for show. The commands have a specific purpose. “Close in here” or “Careful” means the birds are nearby so pay special attention. ”Whoa” means stop and is usually the first command a bird dog learns. Once they have mastered this command, much of the rest of their hunting comes down to instinct. “Daaaay-ud” or ‘Dead bird” means a bird has been shot and the dog needs to switch from finding and pointing birds to retrieving them.

The dogs communicate back mostly with their tails or the way they hold their heads in the wind. Nose down and tail whipping back and forth in rhythm signals “I’m looking”. A speeding up of the tail wagging into short, frenzied snaps means “Pay attention and get ready, I’m closing in”. Of course, the point is the ultimate goal here. The tail snaps to attention, straight and tall. The dog’s muscles tense, his nose up and focused ahead, while his whiskers twitch and he peers at you out of the corner of his eye as if to say, “They’re right there. I’ve done my part, now its your turn.”  When a young dog is locked on point, the handler may ease up to him and stroke his tail in an upward fashion from the bottom-up, and murmur encouragement to him, “whooooooooa”. This is called “styling-up” the dog, teaching him patience and the correct form. The tail shouldn’t be twitching or moving, which is referred to as “flagging”, but rock steady.

The dog who finds the birds is generally the closest to them and the find is acknowledged as “her point”. Other dogs in the brace are expected to honor her point and “back” the dog who found the birds, staying behind her, locked in their own point and at attention even if they have not yet discovered where the birds are crouched. Once everyone is in position, the handler or a hunter moves in ahead of the dog to flush the birds. This is where the difference between wild and pen-raised birds comes into play. Wild birds will rarely hold long enough for the person flushing the birds to get in among them. If they have been hunted before, they may flush before the hunter is even within shotgun range. When flushing pen raised birds on the other hand, the hunter has to stomp and beat the bushes, sometimes one must even touch the birds with the toe of a boot before they will get up and fly. They are pitiful creatures, timid, with little survival instinct compared to wild birds who survive by avoiding predators of every form from snakes to bobcats to sharp-shinned hawks.

There are times in one’s life that linger. They exist outside of time and stay with a person. Times when every moment is full of meaning. The days I spent walking behind my uncle Bill, Buck, Molly, Rock, Joe, and a host of other pointers and setters shaped the rest of my life. It was the first time I came to know my native place and began thinking about how the land works. The whole aesthetic—the dogs working, the slow business of walking over the land at a pace at which you could feel like a part of the world, the landscape itself—fields and pines, fencerows, even hardwood bottoms, the laid-back camaraderie in the field, the conversation, the joking, the excitement of turning the dogs out in the mornings, the peace and beauty of finishing up the day as the sun hung low and lit up the dry, winter sky like a Bierstadt painting, knowing you couldn’t have spent this one day any better doing anything else—these things took root in me and painted my fundamental outlook on life with a deep desire to maintain a direct connection with things of the land.

The bobwhite quail’s heyday as a species in my home state of Georgia began with the settlement of small farms, where the land was cleared and the woods burned, particularly in the Coastal Plain in the mid to late 1800’s. Throughout the mid 1900’s, even the Piedmont counties surrounding Atlanta had many small farms where bobwhite quail thrived. But, their populations throughout the state have declined by 85% since the 1960s, primarily for lack of suitable habitat—the early successional habitat consisting of native grasses, legumes, weeds, briars, bugs, and shrubs. Rough land- cutovers, hedgerows, overgrown field edges–perhaps not too appealing to the eye or financially rewarding, but full of other kinds of treasure.

In 1962 there were an estimated 135,000 quail hunters in Georgia, who took around 4 million quail. By 2019, the number of quail hunters had declined to 12,742 people who killed 279,291 birds. The striking difference in these numbers alone are further amplified when one considers that nine out of ten of the birds killed in 2019 were not even wild birds. They were pen-raised quail. However, were it not for the use of pen-raised birds on hunting preserves, quail hunting would be, almost totally, a lost art. These preserves are there today because hunters value the experience but can’t find wild birds to hunt.

To the uninformed, it may, at first glance, be an easy assumption to argue that part of the bobwhite quail’s population decline resulted from over-hunting. But this would be a grossly inaccurate assumption. Hunters can take up to 20% of a bobwhite population without endangering the population if the habitat is good. And regardless of public opinion, most hunters care deeply about the animals they hunt. Quail hunters in particular have long been known to follow a set of somewhat gentlemanly, unwritten rules and self-imposed hunting limits—shooting only roosters, no shooting of single birds following the covey rise, shooting an individual covey only a handful of times—to help steward the bobwhite population.

The real villain in the saga of the bobwhite’s population decline is what today is called “progress”. Clean farming—the cultivation of large fields from edge to edge—with no transition vegetation and no hedgerows or fencerows, which makes it more efficient for the farmer (and the agri-business industry) but less hospitable to the healthy functioning of the land.

It was Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, who famously called upon farmers to plant fencerow to fencerow and to get big or get out. But, what have we gained from it? Greater efficiency? Sure, if all you consider is production. We’ve gained an agricultural landscape increasingly simplified and aggregated into fewer hands, often the hands of corporate interests, either outright, or de facto, as those who make money off the farmer grow wealthy.  The farmer himself is reduced largely to dependency on the government for survival, and because he takes a smaller and smaller cut of what he produces from the land, in order to survive in the system, he has to plant more and more acres. In the process, he is pressured to cultivate every square inch. The average citizen benefits from this by being assured a cheap supply of processed food.

But, what is the cost of all this efficiency? There are many, but in the context of this essay, let’s focus on the farmland. We’ve lost about 800,000 farms in the last 50 years. Many have been consolidated into large operations who, by necessity, are focused on efficiency. It is not only bobwhite quail that have been displaced. There are 1/3 fewer birds of all kinds in the United States today than there were 50 years ago.

We have witnessed the erasing of a landscape’s character, and in some cases, its natural function, in order to turn the land into a factory. Large pastures full of exotic grasses—good for cattle—but too dense for quail and their chicks to traverse, intensively managed, short-rotation pine trees with their weed-free and sterile understories, gross and unrestrained large-scale urbanization in all its forms with no connectivity to habitat patches—all of it contributes. Put another way, it’s my fault and it’s your fault. It’s the fault of the choices we have made for how we prefer to live in the late 20^th and 21^st Centuries. But, increasingly, the older I get, that way of living is looking less and less attractive and more and more foolish to me.

The bobwhite quail is one of those species that would fade away unnoticed by the average urban/suburban person because the birds live in the fringe of brushy, half-wild places and the edges of farm fields. The types of places that don’t even exist anymore in most areas. These are places that, if they can be found, few urbanites/suburbanites have reason to tread in every day life. The bobwhite quail or the absence of them is much more noticeable to country people.

If nothing else, bobwhite quail are a lesson on landscape and how our use of it affects everything else on it. I certainly don’t have all the answers on this topic but I have had an experience that taught me something. The farm I grew up hunting is not what it once was with regard to quail habitat. The birds are still around but not in numbers that support hunting. We tried to continue running the dogs into the early 2000’s but it got to the point that we were fortunate to find a single covey on 1500 acres of land. It became obvious that it was past time to stop hunting.

The first noticeable changes to the population came in the late 1990’s when the first irrigation pivots were installed. This required removal of some of the small wooded “heads” or stands of timber dotting the low spots in the fields, which always seemed to hold a few birds, so that the pivots could traverse as close to a full circle on the land as possible. It made the land more efficient from the agribusiness side of the equation and increased the value of the farmland and the lease income, but the birds disappeared, and with them, a great joy.

In 2005, I started planting pecan orchards on some of the row crop land on my part of the family farm. Over the next 14 years I converted 70 acres of intensive row crop land to pecan orchards, which are basically meadows with trees growing in them. I planted crimson clover to increase organic matter, provide a little supplemental N for the trees, and serve as a haven for beneficial insects that feed on the pests. An unexpected perk of the orchards was that by enhancing the diversity of the landscape and providing some spring feeding and early summer nesting cover in the form of the clover, I began to see and hear a few more quail on the farm. The orchards provided some much-needed continuity between the fields and woods and increased the amount of edge habitat so prized by bobwhite quail. As the trees grew and required pruning each winter, I began to pile some of the limbs in the edges of the nearby pines to create winter cover in the form of brush piles. They still aren’t there in the numbers we used to see and there are more improvements to be made, but it is obvious the birds are responding to the landscape. If you build it, they will come.

In 2018, I was able to buy another 84 acres about three miles away from the family farm. It appealed to me partly because land rarely comes up for sale in the area but also because it was an old-timey farm. It consisted of three small fields ranging in size from 8 to 16 acres, patchy stands of mature pines ranging from 2.5 to 8 acres, a recently cleared 33 acre cutover, and a slim ring of pine rows and saw tooth oaks surrounding the property.

I try to burn the pine stands annually. Fire improves the understory of the pines to enhance nesting cover, brood range, and insect and seed foraging conditions. It reduces hardwood invasion into the forest mid-story, enhancing sunlight. It even decreases the abundance of quail parasites. Its magical to watch how this one act of burning a stand of pines can make life better for bobwhite quail. There is bicolor lespedeza, a gourmet dining experience for quail, planted beneath the pines. There are lots of brushy edges. In addition, I converted the largest field to a pecan orchard within the first year and planted clover. I planted a pollinator patch of native wildflowers down the length of one side of the orchard. It is here that I called back and forth in conversation with the quail. I know of at least three coveys of quail on this 84 acres—more than I saw on the entire 1500 acres of the family farm in the early 2000’s .

This small 84 acre farm showed me that quail can thrive on a small acreage given the right conditions. They need some perennial weeds, some warm-season grasses without a thick understory, some brushy cover of briars and shrubs. Preferably, the landscape should consist of about 1/3 of each of these habitats. Leaving as little as 2.5% of the cropland area in habitat suitable for quail can increase the wild bird population. This can be done simply with 15’ wide strips thirty to one hundred feet long along some of the field edges.

Of course, the continuity of the landscape matters. If the farms and land around you are biological deserts, you can only do so much. I am fortunate on this 84 acres that the surrounding landscape is similar in its diversity. I don’t know how long it can remain this way, but I will continue to do my part. Bobwhite quail are just one indication of the disconnect that currently exists between people and the land. We simply have to decide if we want the bobwhite quail on the land or not. Are my thoughts of bringing the bobwhite quail back to our rural landscapes a pipe dream? Maybe so, but then everyone’s got to have a dream.

I owe the bobwhite quail a debt of gratitude that I truly cannot repay, but I can do a little. Maybe, in this one place, that is enough. Maybe one day, I will again hear the language of dog work on this place. Perhaps a sinewed pointer will thrash along through the brush, its tail snapping sharply in quick, frenzied strokes while a voice calls evenly, “close in here”. Maybe the dog will stop suddenly, intent on the odor wafting through its nose, tail held stiff and tall, its gaze focused on a blackberry patch along a hedgerow. The voice will utter, “whoa”. Maybe we’ll ease in front of the dogs and the ground will ignite once again in a muffled eruption of feathers. A few hours later as the evening light colors the sky and the dogs load up, maybe I’ll hear another voice, a sharp tone piercing the dry winter air, calling the singles back into the safety and protection of the covey once again.