PREDATOR CONTROL AND QUAIL Article and photos by DALE ROLLINS, Ph.D. Ziploc® bag for an eat-and-run lifestyle, and multiple breeding attempts afford a quail with an array of tools to help it stay afloat in a sea of predators.
“A quail’s life is full of tests. Many critters break up their nests, Possums, skunks, raccoons too. It’s enough to make a bobwhite blue.” ~Bobwhite Brigade cadence IS THERE A PLACE FOR PREDATOR CONTROL IN QUAIL MANAGEMENT? Ask many quail managers and hunters and they’ll proclaim, “Of course!” Ask a wildlife professional, and they’ll likely counter with an antiphonal echo of “habitat, habitat, habitat.” Ask me and I’ll espouse my Texas Tech Theory of Relativity, “It depends!” Predation as a selection pressure has shaped most everything we know and love about quail: their anatomy, their behavior and their ecology. We appreciate many of these adaptations such as covey formation and thunderous flushes honed over many generations of coping with predators which endear quail to our hearts. Their cryptic plumage, their crop, which acts like a
30 T E X A S W I L D L I F E
AUGUST 2021
THE PLAYING FIELD Indeed, a quail can hold its own in a fair fight, but is today’s playing field level? I argue it is not—in today’s landscape we’re asking a bobwhite to fight with one wing tied behind its back. Currently our quail are mired in a “predator pit,” and it’s beginning to take a toll. At a statewide quail symposium in 1999, I participated in a point-counterpoint argument on “Is there a Place for Predator Control in Quail Management?” I presented the point argument “Yes” while my colleague Dr. Nova Silvy presented the counterpoint argument “No”. Some of the points I made in that presentation are included herein and likely have become even more challenging for quail in the past 20 years. Our radio-marked bobwhites at Rolling Plains Quail Research Ranch (RPQRR), and at our translocation sites in Erath and Kent counties really felt the brunt of predation this past spring— indeed a veritable “death March.” We sustained losses of 30 or more birds at each site from talon or fang. I’d like to think that when vegetation begins to green up in mid-March that a quail has survived its annual winter gauntlet. But their trials inevitably continue—and often escalate—as they exercise their spring rituals of dispersal and “bob-whiting” takes place. When nesting season begins about May 1 the challenge of laying a clutch of 15 eggs and incubating them for 23 days without disturbance from various “mesomammals,” snakes and feral hogs becomes a daunting task. A PERFECT STORM FOR PREDATORS Here’s the “perfect storm” that has brewed over the past three years for those of us in West Texas: • Drought has reigned (pun intended) for the past three years. Thankfully, many of us received good rains during May which has laid a foundation of good nesting cover. • Rangeland habitats going into May west of the 98th meridian looked mostly pitiful; if you’ve had any cattle, it was probably too many for the quail’s concerns because it resulted in a lack of nesting cover. When I use the Softball Habitat Evaluation Technique, I say you should NOT be able to see a softball from pitching distance which is 46 feet away…in many areas of West Texas, you could still see it if it was shot from a Howitzer. This sad scenario extended throughout most of the Rolling Plains and farther westward. Most of the Scaled Quail range missed the May rains and is still mired in drought.
