Georgia’s population of Northern Bobwhite Quail has declined by 90 percent since 1966, and the state has won national recognition for a program to promote the bird’s recovery – and to stabilize the $125 million quail-hunting industry clustered around Albany.
Georgia’s program to promote the Northern Bobwhite Quail has earned national recognition. The bird is at the heart of Georgia’s economically significant quail hunting industry. Credit: remingtoncountryoutfittes.com
Quail are relocated from areas where they are relatively abundant, to areas where they are scarce and the land has been prepared to support their recovery. Georgia started the program officially in 2006.
The program sounds simple enough.
But it turns out that quail are not easy to relocate, according to the National Bobwhite Technical Committee, which is an affiliate of a quail recovery program based at the University of Tennessee.
“For years quail professionals routinely believed that wild quail transplantation had little potential to provide real gains for bobwhites,” NBTC Chair and Awards Committee Chair Marc Puckett, of Virginia, said in a statement.
However, success has been recorded through a program operated along the Georgia/Florida border by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and a non-profit based in Tallahassee, Fla., Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy.
The program is yielding results that could be implemented in other states to help wild birds rebound from steep declines in population – provided that a proper habitat has been created on the receiving property, according to the statement.
Here’s how Puckett described the results:
A program in Georgia and Florida has established that Northern Bobwhite Quail can be relocated to areas where such quail are in short supply. These two birds are a male (left) and female. Credit: attractionmag.com
“Using techniques pioneered by the Albany Area Quail Project and TTRS in the late 1990s, they have developed an innovative approach that has resulted in the transplantation of 1,275 wild quail to five properties totaling over 18,700 acres in Georgia and Florida, and another 1,750 wild bobwhites to nine properties totaling over 70,000 acres in six other states.”
Georgia’s quail population has been decimated by changes in land use, including the conversion of longleaf pine forests to loblolly pine forest. Loblolly is the most commercially important tree species in the southeast, according to a report from North Carolina State University.
Longleaf pines once covered about 92 million acres across the southeast. Less than 3 percent of this forest remains, and it is being lost at a rate of 100,000 acres a year. In north Florida, the longleaf pine forest has declined by 84 percent, according to the draft version of the State Wildlife Protection Plan.
Against this backdrop, Georgia lawmakers and state officials have worked for years to promote quail populations. In addition to any desire to protect the bird population is the economic impact of wealthy hunters who visit the famed quail plantations.
Tall Timbers and Florida State University’s Center for Economic Forecasting recently released an economic impact analysis. It showed hunting properties generated almost $125 million from hunting properties. Almost 900 jobs are associated with the quail hunting properties, and these jobs generated more than $38 million in wages.
Georgia has supported a number of programs, since the mid 1990s, to promote the natural habitat of quail, according to the draft version of the State Wildlife Protection Plan:
