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Thursday, January 31, 2008

Three veteran bird hunters say we can bring back bob

By Bill Cochran

I can remember my last quail hunt in Botetourt County, years ago. Our dogs were working a patch of good-looking cover that was bordered by a bunch of houses being built in a new subdivision.

From the houses came the sounds of sawing and hammering, but all that stopped when our dogs went on point. The carpenters put aside their work momentarily to watch. Everything became deathly still.

When the birds had flushed with a blur of brown wings, and we had shot and the dogs had made their retrieve, the sawing and hammering resumed.

Quail populations were beginning to take a nosedive about then, along with the legacy of hunting these gentleman birds. It was the sawing and hammering. New houses replaced ill-kept farms. Strip-mall parking lots and highways buried fallow fields. Clean farming gobbled up the last snatch of cover.

The birds pretty much disappeared in the western part of Virginia, then in the Piedmont and Tidewater. It was like a cancer that spread through the Carolinas into the deep South.

“It is a range-wide thing,” said Bob Duncan, chief of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries Wildlife Department.

What is strange, while bird populations diminished, other wildlife species, including deer, turkey and even bear were making remarkable comebacks. For hunters in general, that helped ease the pain of losing quail, one of the saddest chapters of wildlife management.

Bird hunting has become a sport of your granddad. A new generation of hunters has come along who’ve never experienced the thrill of walking stiff-legged past a staunch dog that has a covey penned. The generation before them did some bird hunting, maybe owned a dog, or at least savored the distinctly country sound of a bob white calling on a warm, early-summer morning. But they gave up quail hunting, maybe hunting altogether, or they pursued more promising targets.

Then there is the remnant of old-timers, who lived in the good old days of bird hunting, and dream about it today, maybe even hunt now and then on land they manage or on excursions to Texas. Through all the gloom, these aging sportsmen harbor the hope that someday the golden era of bird hunting can return, or at least a decent representation of it.

Former governor Lynwood Holton is one. Former DGIF board chairman Charles McDaniel of Fredericksburg is another. Russell Garrison, former DGIF board member from Colonial Heights, is yet another.

The trio attended a DGIF board meeting in Richmond last week, as representatives of a Quail Focus Group that recommended the department establish a Quail Action Plan. The board complied.

“There is the consensus that quail populations can be restored throughout the commonwealth if you have habitat,” Holton said. Then he named several people and places where coveys thrive. McDaniel’s farm was one spot.

“In preparation for this meeting, I went quail hunting yesterday,” McDaniel said. “In two hours on my property and adjacent property in King & Queen County I found six coveys of birds -- two hours!”

A multitude of things had gone into his success in restoring birds and bird hunting, McDaniel said. Included were habitat restoration, feeding, predator control, stocking. The latter has been viewed a folly many biologists, but McDaniel told me that if you get the right pen-raised birds they will thrive and react like wild ones.

The action plan calls for establishing demonstration areas where people can see firsthand what goes into restoring bird populations, then duplicate it across the state.

“We have got to get this whole culture of quail hunting going again,” said McDaniel. Look at it this way, he said, quail hunting could be an economic benefit in areas where jobs are scarce.

It was refreshing to see three old timers so positive about success, especially when my files show so many attempts and failures in the past, including a study in the 1980s by the General Assembly and $4.2 million DGIF study in the '90s. Neither of these nor other efforts turned the tide. Often the data collected was scarcely used.

What’s different this time? Is this another futile task being handed off to an overworked and under-funded wildlife department?

There have been lots of studies in the past, agreed Keith Toler of the Quail Unlimited State Council.

“We need an action plan, not a study,” he said. “It has been studied enough.”

Toler said it can work this time because it will be an effort to put into practice the things we have learned.

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