4/10/2023 0 Comments Hear again quaikIt would be necessary to manipulate human perspectives. HugeĪgriculture operations have replaced the small familyįarmstead that offered the "hedgerow type habitat" that Giant fields of row crops leave little room for quail. Getting those kids away from hunting and into the very controlled environments of various sports and games needing indoor electrical sockets, depriving them of a love for field and forest, would have been essential in ridding the countryside of the whistle of the quail. Yes, we would need huge leaps in technology to hook the youth, real hunting is a very fun, addicting activity. Children learned to shoot and kill in the confines of a virtual world inside a television set instead of the wide open spaces carrying honest shotguns and wearing muddy boots. Hunting would be viewed with mild suspicion and slowly be replaced with games of mayhem and exploding supervillains. While they would approve of killing as part of the demand for meat, they would know less of where it came from. It would lay the land open to other endeavors, other uses, and with a little tweaking, we could make this work against the quail.Īs Americans slowly evaporated from the farm, they would find themselves two, three and four generations removed.insulated from the realities of grow this, kill this and eat this. To begin the kind of change needed, we would invent a huge automobile industry, a service to entice people off of the small, nearly subsistence farming lifestyle that had captured most of the southern landscape since the Civil War. Probably most important, was the move from a largely rural American society to a more urban and suburban and even ex-suburban society. If the habitat is good, they bounce back year after year. A quail covey typically loses 90 percent of its fall population before the next breeding season. This would have to be a multi-pronged attack. It was a management plan of changing demographics, sensibilities, economies, and priorities. To get rid of quail we would first need to change human behaviors. Quail needed people to keep house for them. The quail lived in a well-defined “biological house,” each covey needing a home with specific habitats. So, here is how a management strategy for ridding the south of quail would have played out. Limit any of the these and manipulate a few other factors such as predator numbers, then marginal habitat becomes no habitat, good habitat becomes marginal and even the best habitat becomes limited. To make it simple, quail need food, nesting cover, brood feeding habitat, loafing cover and escape cover. To approach the problem, we must understand quail biology and habitat. It worked to get rid of bison, and other game and non-game species. To get rid of quail we would need to get rid of that landscape. Quail were simply collateral damage in a world bent on progress at the time. Considering that we have done just that very thing since 1950, I wondered how I would have approached the problem. With so many quail fluttering around back in those days, it might have been of little concern to suggest getting rid of a few of the pesky, noisy little fellows. Training bird dogs is something done by fewer people now. Some of the dads may have been peeved because the kids were finding their favorite hunting spots. In fact, with considerable indignation, they would have told the school board that the coach had been seen sneaking out with them and that this was much to the detriment of the boys doing well in school. They would not have been concerned about the kids shooting one another rather they would have been concerned because the boys were coming in late and sneaking off early to quail hunt. Since soccer moms had not been invented yet, the football moms might have been considerably disturbed because the boys were bringing guns to school. What if in 1950 there was a group completely bent on the removal of quail from the landscape? It seems odd looking back, but we might imagine them to have been upset over any number of things. Even the honeysuckle and fall’s royal colors have dwindled in many areas. Quail are no longer there, at least not as many, and in some places, they’re simply gone. Not so long ago the call of “bob.white” was as ubiquitous on the southern landscape as were the mist-laden scents of honeysuckle in the spring and a riot of red and gold leaves in the fall. Allan Houston & Jill Easton | Originally published in GameKeepers: Farming for Wildlife Magazine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |