Multiply Your Quail Through
Effective Land Management

by Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel

How was your quail hunting this year? Good? Not so good? Just plain lousy?

"The birds just weren't there," you grumble, "not like they were five years ago."

If you quail hunt on private land, either your own or on a lease, you have the unique opportunity to directly affect the quail population in the area. You can, by your actions, bring about an increase in the number of birds available for you to hunt.

Manipulating the population of any wildlife species is a complex process; game managers spend years in school learning the profession. But you can take a page from the game manager's book, employ a few relatively simple techniques that will improve the habitat of the area, and enhance the birds' ability to reproduce and grow.


GOOD GAME MANAGEMENT isn't as simple as throwing out some feed or planting a couple of food plots; it's a process that, in order to be successful, must continue throughout the year, and from year to year. Begin your management plan by evaluating the habitat in the area.

According to Dr. Leonard Brennan, director of research for Tall Timbers Research Station north of Tallahassee, quail need three main types of habitat.

"They have a broad range of acceptance of vegetation types," he says. "The key is to maintain blocks of early successional habitat types. That is, areas that are zero to one year, one to two years, and two to three years post-disturbance."

To reduce this to its simplest terms, each year you need to subject one-third of your property to some type of activity that sets back the natural progression of plant growth on the area: mowing, disking, burning, whatever. And here in the South, the most common means of doing that is fire.


OPEN PINEY WOODS is the classic southern quail habitat. "Pine trees are great because they drop needles to burn," Brennan says. "They also drop pine mast, or pine nuts, on the ground, which the quail relish for food. But quail thrive in many areas that don't have pine trees, so that's not essential."

And quail areas need not be just woods. Brennan says quail do very well in open agricultural areas as well. The key, he says, is management of understory species: those plants which are low-growing, such as grasses, legumes, all the things we usually call "weeds."

Okay, so you have a tract of property you hunt on, you're going to divide it into three roughly equal portions, and burn off the undergrowth on one of those portions each year. It's still not quite that simple.

"The three areas need to be in blocks that are small and patchy," Brennan says. "If you have, say, 100 acres, you don't want to have any blocks bigger than about 15 acres. You need to create a mosaic."

All of that's the good news. The bad news is that the 100 acres in the above example is not really enough to effectively manage for quail.

"That's only going to carry a few coveys of birds," he says. "Two to three hundred is minimum. On a small tract, such as 15 acres, you're only going to be able to carry maybe one covey of birds."


THE GOOD NEWS IS that you don't have to have all of these things on your own land. By evaluating the land-use patterns around you, you can contribute to improvement of quail habitat on a small tract.

If your neighbors are at all tuned into wildlife management in Florida, chances are they're already following some kind of a burning regime on their property. If you approach them about cooperating on a fire schedule, you may find them willing to work out a plan that increases quail in the entire area.

For instance, one of your neighbors may have a small pasture that adjoins your property. If it's only moderately grazed, it can be a real asset in quail production (heavy grazing takes off too much plant material to enhance quail habitat). On the other side, your neighbor may have a section of piney woods she burns every two or three years.

In this case, the solution is fairly simple: find out from your piney-woods neighbor whether she plans to burn during any given year. If she does, you don't; if she doesn't, you do. That will provide an uneven-aged mixture of areas for the birds.

If you're fortunate enough to have a hundred acres or so to play with, divide the tract into a series of small blocks. Burn part of it each year, and disk part of it. If you have piney woods, Brennan says, have 50 percent or less canopy cover.

"That is," he says, "if you stand and look up you see 50 percent or more blue sky."


FIRE MANAGEMENT and controlled burning are both art and science. Typically in Florida, piney woods are burned during the winter, when the weather is cool and the fire is relatively easy to manage. But natural fires occur in the summer, when they are ignited by lightning from thunderstorms; historically, these fires burned literally millions of acres throughout the Southeast.

"When you need to burn depends on the condition of the habitat," Brennan says. "If you have a problem with hardwood encroachment, you may want to do some summer burning because you'll be more likely to kill hardwoods. If you don't have a hardwood problem, you can probably get away with cool-season burning." He suggests that no more than 10 to 15 percent of area should be in dense thickets.

Some of Brennan's suggestions are a bit surprising. For instance, he says planting food plots is probably not worth the trouble and expense. Nor do you need to do anything in particular to provide special nesting cover. The fire regime we've already outlined will provide both.

"The usual nesting cover is typically an area about two years old (two years post-fire), and dominated by bunch grasses," Brennan says.

Once the baby quail have hatched, they move onto areas that are open at ground level but have an overhead canopy of weeds. This is the type of area that's one year past burning.

Think of it this way: areas that have just been burned are good brood range. Areas two years past burning provide nesting sites. And areas three years post-burn are escape cover.

Brennan is skeptical about providing quail with artificial feed.

"Feeding birds will do at least one thing: it's going to concentrate them and make them easier to hunt," he says. "There is no evidence that has shown that artificial feeding will increase population levels. In fact, there's evidence now that shows that birds which are fed artificial food may have their nutrition compromised because they don't spend their time eating native vegetation and insects."


SO IF YOU'RE INTERESTING IN MANAGING your land for quail, the key is fire. But it's not as easy as just setting the woods alight. A good fire plan involves plowing fire lines, understanding the wind and the weather and how they will affect the fire, and timing the burn so it takes off the right amount of plant material and kills what you want it to kill without destroying everything in its path.

Beyond that, fire is not a tool to play with. Even on the best of days, a fire can go squirrelly and turn from an instrument of regeneration to a raging beast in little more than an instant. Setting the woods afire without having the proper firebreaks in place and the proper tools at hand is a recipe for almost certain disaster; it's also illegal.

And in Florida's increasingly urban society, those of us who burn the piney woods are being forced to take responsibility for seeing that the smoke from fires does not create a health hazard by where it blows. Dense clouds of smoke obscuring visibility on a highway can contribute to auto accidents; smoke drifting through a residential neighborhood can bring the wrath of citified residents down on your head.

The bottom line is, if you're going to undertake a burning regime on your property, you need to know much more about the art and science of burning than we can tell you here. The Florida Division of Forestry offers an excellent one-day course on controlled burning. Graduates are certified to conduct controlled burns not only for themselves but for other people as well. To learn more about this program call the Division of Forestry office in your area, or contact your county forester. If you're not going to take the course, call your county forester anyway. He or she can recommend a certified burner who can, for a small per-acre fee, conduct your burn safely and efficiently.


Copyright (c) 1993 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All Rights Reserved.

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