Bear Grease - Ep. 336: Backwoods University - The Rise and Fall of Bobwhite Quail

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

On this episode of Backwoods University we’re going to find out what really happened to the bobwhite quail and the hunting culture that surrounded it. Well known hunter and conservationist, Will Primos, gives us a first-hand account of what quail hunting and quail hunting culture was like during the perceived “glory days” of the 1950s and 1960s. He also shares his experience of watching quail seemingly disappear from the landscape. Wildlife biologist and upland game bird professor, Dr. Mark McConnell, gives an in-depth explanation of the many factors that led to these mass quail declines. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. On this episode, I want to tell you about Bob White Quail, a bird that once covered the entire North American continent in abundance, and the hunting culture centered completely around them, that now has almost been completely forgotten. It's late January. I'm in North Mississippi, and the sound that you're hearing is me hiking through the woods. I've been at this all day with a new friend of mine and his dog. We're out hunting, but we're not here hunting deer, we're not here hunting ducks, we're not even here hunting squirrels. In fact, the few other hunters that we've crossed past with today gave us odd looks when we told them what we were here after.

What's the most cubbies you found in the day you said? Two. And both of them, pretty sizable cubbies, you said? Yeah, yeah. There's two cubbies in here, according to... when I came in September. One was farther away that way. I'm quite surprised we didn't push them

because they usually, well, we'll make a circle and come out of the wind will be in our favor. Come on. What we're hunting is Bob White Quail. An animal that is called this place, this state, this continent, home since before any of us

were alive on this earth. But unfortunately, these days can be tough to find. Our mission today is simple. Find wild quail. We're in an area. where there still remains a huntable population. We hiked onward, following the dog through every thorn, bramble, and cane thicket that she could find,

until eventually she went on point, letting us know she had found a bird. Oh yeah. What you're hearing now is us making a game plan as to how to approach the dog on point and flush the bird. This can be extremely tricky, putting ourselves in position for a good shot given the type of thickets these birds call home. This next part, flushing the bird, is almost unbearably suspenseful. You don't know where it's going to happen, you don't know when it's going to happen, you just walk towards the dog waiting for the forest floor to erupt under your feet, and you better be ready.

Wow. That's my fault. That's more mesmerized with the bird than anything, I think. Wow. I stood there motionless in awe of what I had just seen. A single quail exploded out of that sea of thorny vines, flew right over the top of my head, and disappeared back into the brush so quickly

that the whole incident became a memory quicker than I could even process the fact that I had missed. We both missed. And frankly, I don't think either of us cared. But here's the big picture of all this. Like I mentioned earlier, Bob White Quail are native here. They've called this entire continent home for a long time. There's research that even has them on the landscape,

up to a million years ago. That means that Bob White Quail were flying and whistling the same time that woolly mammoths and ground slots were still roaming around. That is wild to me. And at one point, not too long ago, there was so many that we had an entire hunting culture built around them. And now, in 2025, they've been reduced to a fraction of what once was.

And I'm on a mission to find out why. The guy that's going to help us do that is someone you probably already know. His name is Will Primots, and he's been a dear friend and mentor for me for well over a decade. You and I both know Will for spring turkey hunting, elk, white tails, but I never knew he got his start hunting with Bob White Quill. I'm sitting in Will's office. The room is filled with countless celebrations of the outdoors. Antlers, hand-carved duck decoys, paintings of wild turkeys, countless books. And I've had the pleasure of knowing Will for a long time. But I couldn't help but notice his enthusiasm today. I think he's excited to share this story.

My uncle Gus was a devoted quail hunter. He had pointers and setters. And I can still remember the setter. Her name was Cheyenne. And I got paid a quarter for school, get up, and he lived like a real third of a mile away. You know, it wasn't very far, but I could get there on my bicycle in no time. I would go over there, run over there, and For a quarter, I got to clean the dog pens. And that started probably when I was about eight years old. Will's connection to quail and bird dog started when he was just a boy in rural Mississippi in the 1950s. Little did he know that this would start a fire that would burn for a lifetime. Here's more from Will about his uncle Gus.

But his friend was Buck Deerman. Buck came a fast friend of mine as I grew older. Buck and Gus would go quail hunting. Madison County, which is where we are right now and where I live, back then was a rural setting used to be big huge cotton plantations, rolling cotton plantations. And back then what they did, the ground was very fertile, had never been, you know, farm or anything. They'd clear it. They'd plant their crops. And when they depleted the nourishment of the soil, they didn't have fertilizers and stuff. They just go clear another patch of land. And that other would grow up. And over the many,

many decades and years, Madison County became small, rural farm, vegetable gardens and people who wanted to live in the country. Fences everywhere, no posted signs. You just pulled up and got out of your car, and it was just a perfect quail habitat. I didn't know that at the time. I just thought that was normal. What Will just told us there is one of the most important parts of this entire story. It's really not even about quail. It's quail habitat. Remember that, because that detail is going to become more relevant later on. But Buck was very long-legged, and Gus was almost as long-legged, and here this little kid is, and just trying to keep up with them, but to see the dogs work, and they wouldn't let me

carry a gun in those early years, but I got to be there and watch the dog's point, watch the shoot, and both of them shot Browning Automatics, you know, the old Belgian made, old humpback, you know, anyway, my Uncle Gus died a few years ago, but I, I remember in his home, he had a beautiful den where he would entertain. He was a big businessman. He had entertained. And he had a portrait. He commissioned a portrait to be made of him kneeling down with his shotgun with Cheyenne.

I got a chance to see this painting, and frankly, it's incredible. A square-jawed man with black hair wearing a khaki jacket knelt down with his bird dogs. And I couldn't help but notice how much of a resemblance it had to will. I think this gives us a really clear picture into how important and valued quail and quail hunting was at the time. I mean, think about it. How many people do you know these days that commission a painter to do a portrait of their duck dog or a deer that they shot? Bob White Quail meant something to these people. But what really sticks out to me is the background of this painting. It looks nothing like what Madison County, Mississippi looks like today.

Today it's neighborhoods, business parks, pine plantations, whether he meant to or not, Will's showing us this painting gave us one of the most crucial pieces to this quail puzzle. It's habitat. I now want to hear from a biologist to give us more on this quail story. Mark McConnell is an Uplandbird professor at Mississippi State University. He starts off by talking about tall timbers. FYI, this is one of the nation's largest quail research centers located in South Georgia. Some of the early research, I know you know about Tall Timbers Research Station. Well, that research station was started as a response to quail decline, even in that part of the world.

Right. That book right there on my desk right next to you. That's considered like the Quail Bob. It was like the first really robust study of Bob White. They started that study. It published it in 1931, but they started it, you know, several years before that. 1931. So they were already seeing declines in 1931?

They were seeing declines in the late 1890s. Oh, wow. I did not know that. Yeah, you hear a lot of people say, oh, they've been declined since the 60s. The only reason we say that is because the breeding bird survey started in 1966. So that's the first documented decline. The 1890s, Will was just telling us these incredible quail hunting stories from Mississippi in the 1950s. Now Mark's telling us the decline started 60 years earlier than that.

I can't keep up. I want to ask Mark about quail declines and densities. And there's a fair amount of reasons for that, if you think about what was going on in the country and kind of some of the industrial nature of things. Herbert Stoddard said at the time that he thought a bird per acre was as good as you could ever get. And then they found out through time, and tall timbers is a great example of this. You absolutely can get more than a bird per acre. There are places in the red hills that can hit a bird and a half, two birds per acre. Now, you don't stay there forever.

You know, populations, nothing goes. up forever. But you can absolutely exceed that density to varying degrees. People would wet their pants over a bird fruit in Mississippi. So kind of the story of quail, if you start like the 30,000 foot view, the entire landscape changed. Everything we did in the landscape, with very few exceptions, wasn't designed to mess up quail, but it certainly messed up quail. Think about, say, let's go 1890, 1900, somewhere in that pre-war War I. Think about what the landscape would have looked like we did not have the green revolution of agriculture yet. We didn't have fescue yet.

Explain what that is. Oh, the tall fescue. It's an exotic forage grass that we brought over to stabilize soil. And it's a great winter forage because it's a cool season grass. It's a very challenging plant for quail management. So we know it was before Bermuda grass. It was before all these exotic forage grasses took over grazing and forage production. It was before we were farming Lobbalee pine trees like row crops.

That's about the time we kind of, the national U.S. policy was pretty much anti-fire. Fire was a bad thing, right? So you've got industrialization, you've got expansion, you've got all these things happening over the next several years. And it just, it all kind of just came together and congealed to just create a landscape where quail could not exist at high densities. That's one thing that it's interesting as I've done some of this digging and some of this research is I'm 32 years old. You take someone a little bit younger than me that grew up, and let's just say Mississippi is where we're at, but this could be applied to a lot of much of the southeast. You take someone that's just a little bit younger than me, then a state of Mississippi that is virtually completely dominated by La Bali Pine, plantation pines. And to them, that's normal.

That's Mississippi. That's our forest composition. That's what the state looks like. And what's wild is you really don't have to go that far back before they was. wildly different. It's clear that the landscape changed in the United States dramatically in the 1900s. But why?

You had the Dust Bowl era, and then you had all these conservation-type approaches, but most of them were planning, you know, exotic grass to stabilize the soil, which had an kind of initial, oh, there's grass. And I was like, oh, God, it's bad grass. And we kind of regretted it.

And then right as you're ramping up in the 60s at the Green Revolution, we figured out, hey, corn is super limited on nitrogen. If we pour nitrogen to it, we could double yields. Then we figured out synthetic herbicide, synthetic fertilizer. And then Earl Betts, who was the Secretary of Agriculture after the Russian wheat crisis, said, hey, get bigger, get out in terms of agricultural, farm ditch to ditch.

That was a statement from the Secretary of Agriculture in the United States. The K-State Radio Network presents an address by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dr. Earl Butts. We must learn in this next generation how to feed as many more people as we have learn to feed since the dawn of history. And do it at a time when there is no new Western hemisphere to discover, when there are no more prairie sods to plow, when there are no more virgin timber on arable land to cut down, do it at a time when we're losing arable land to the urban sprawl to highways. What's the ingredient we're going to put into agriculture then to get this job done? Science, brainpower, professional leadership, for our

scientists battle with Mother Nature. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds

that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, They're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Earl Butz was the United States Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976. During his time in this role, Butts drastically changed agriculture policy, which had significant impacts on the country's landscape. Some of his more notable acts include getting rid of a program that paid farmers to not plant all of their land,

and saying things like get big or get out and plant fence row to fence row. All of these things carry a synonymous message of urging and incentivizing more land being put into production. Dr. Mark McConnell has more thoughts on this. And that expanded ag, so I hear a lot of old-timers talk about, oh yeah, we used to go, had a cubby over here, we'd go hunt down the fence row when we were kids. Go find a fence row nowadays. There are no fence rows, right? And what fence rows are left, they've got roundup or they're weed-eated, you know, whatever, they're clean. So we took all the fence rows out, then we realized we got bigger, so the combine's got bigger and the equipment got bigger. So now you got a 24-row planter when everybody was planting four-row planar.

So the fields got bigger. And as we expanded fields, we took out those margins, those areas, those odd areas that probably weren't the best ground or then maybe a separated a fence line or property boundary. That's where people were finding quail in the 60s. In Mississippi, I've talked to old-timers who were still hunting them pretty hard up into the early 80s. And they said, right about the early 80s, they were like, we're not going to buy new bird dog. I was talking to, I was interviewing James Martin, but he said they were on their last bird. And I said, dude, that sounds like the title of a very depressing country song. Like that's a country song.

Yeah, on my last bird, dog. That would be depressing, but somebody should write that. I can hear the tune in my head right now. Man, that sounds like a muskidine bloodline song just waiting to be written. Mark and I are joking here, but many of us have fathers or grandfathers that have stories similar. to this that were very real experiences for them. Think back to Will's uncle and his dog, Cheyenne. I even have a picture of my own grandfather with his English pointer when he was in his early

30s, quail hunting in Webster County, Mississippi. Those days are gone now. If a fellow was driving around Mississippi these days with an English pointer, he would catch more than a few odd looks, and that is sad to me. But there is hope. Wilbur Primos is one of the guys that's doing something to get quill back on the landscape. You were one of the first people that I can remember that back when you had rivers run, you were doing things on that property to promote Bob White Quail. Yeah. I love conservation and

love trying to understand what we did wrong and what caused some of these things not to go the way they could have to keep the tradition alive. And there's some people that are restoring them. Well, first off, a lot of it was roe crop. It was marginal road crop, dry ground farming. It was not profitable. And so when I bought it, I looked at it, I said, what's a better use for this land? And I met with, ended up meeting a guy named Nick Thomas, who founded the company called Stewart Link that puts conservation on the ground, helps represent the growers to the NRCS and FSA offices. I met with him and said, look, can I put this back into some type of quail habitat? He said, yeah, we can plant warm season native grasses. And we've got experts that'll help

show you how to get ready, how to get the ground prepared, how to, it'll take you over a year to get this going and get it planted. There's so much to learn. You got to have the right kind of planner. You got to choose the different grasses that were native to Mississippi. So I ended up with blue stem, Indian grass, and gammon grass. I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was, we had a few quail. You'd be on a deer stand and you'd see, you'd hear the quail or you'd see them walk by. I remember that. Yeah.

I was, yeah, I was amazed. I hadn't seen it. That's the first, I was probably, I would have been 22 years old. Yeah. And I don't think I had seen a quail since I was like 12. Yeah. When I saw those rivers running, I was amazed. And they walked by the edge of the woods.

Yeah. Yeah. And so when we did the grass and we gave them the habitat, I mean, it exploded. So the most fun for me was in the spring to step outside and to see how many males I could count seeing it. There's one. There's one. There's one. I think my highest I ever got to was 13. Yeah, it was really cool.

Yeah. Because you've got to burn. You can't burn too much. You burn too often. It gets too thick. It's too thick. That's not good. You know, quail need to be able to run around on the ground.

They've got to run between the clumps of grasses. They got to have escape cover. I planted plums, thickets. I planted. I tried to do everything I could. It was fun. Yeah. What do you think the biggest hurdle is?

You know, because I was talking to, I've talked to several folks about this. And it's like one of the biggest things that they think quail face, just talking about specifically here at home in the southeast, is that in order, because we talked about it, you have to be, there almost has to be an intentionality about it these days, if you're going to have quail on a property.

And so to do that, you have to have people, landowners, hunters that are interested in it. And that's kind of a tall order right now because there's not too many places that someone could go and find quail. There's not too many places someone could go and find a good bird dog.

Because you don't see too many people down here riding around with setters and pointers anymore. They're gone, for the most part. That's right. When you lose the resource, you lose a lot that goes with it. If you think about it, and I can get, most upland hunters can be romanticized about it. We all can. We just lose a bird. We lost an entire hunting culture.

That's right. And I liken it now, you know, because spring turkey hunting or duck hunting or deer hunting, whatever. And I tell folks, like, imagine it was gone. Yeah. All of it's gone. And if you take, like, think about deer hunting. Let's talk about deer. But if you take away the deer, then the deer hunting's gone.

You know what else is gone? Deer camp. Deer camp. Weekends at deer camp, watching the football game and grilling out, that's gone now. Stories of you telling your buddies checking your trail cameras all the time. It's all gone. I'm interested in how wildlife affects humans and human culture, and although much of it is gone now,

quail used to dominate the hunting culture of the southeast, much like deer camps dominate the hunting culture now. It was a different world, truly. Here's Will on how he and his family used to celebrate quail season. They were a good many of guys like that, and they would have dinners over at Gus's house after season. They'd have a big quail dinner and bite all their friends that do it.

I don't know how prevalent it was. You hear a lot of people that you meet today. I'm in my 70s, and you hear a lot of people talk about, you know, their daddies that are my age. So, you know, we're almost one generation past it because it was the generation before me that had the quantity and the quality and had that opportunity. I don't know about y'all, but I would give an awful lot to be able to go back in time and attend one of those quail dinners at Will's uncle's house. And while I could continue on about the plight of the Bob White quail and the long-lost hunting culture, I think it's important to point out that there is a silver lining. Here in the past 10 years, there's been a resurgence, not just in quail, but in people.

People like you, people like me, people with an interest in quail, quail habitat, and quail hunting. It's a different landscape, but where people are trying, they've got quill. That's kind of the sounding message of hope is if you've got them, you've got some acreage and you've got some buddies next to you that'll help out, there's a lot of things you can do to keep. Everyone talks about, and it is, it's a terribly depressing story of the quail. It really is. But the longer I've been doing this, I'm like, you know what? Yeah, it's depressing.

But it's also pretty inspiring. The fact that I can, like, I can go to Rankin County. I did a site visit in Rankin County with John Mark Curtis, our Quill Forever state biologist. We did a site visit, God, two years ago now. and the guy had some pines, not many, a couple hundred acres. He was burning them and thinning them. His neighbor had a tornado come through. I think it was a hardwood stand and just ripped it and he salvaged it.

It was like a nice little clear cut. There were quails singing everywhere. In Rankin County, not far off a major highway. And we're driving back and he said something pretty cool. He's like, you know, just about anywhere in this state, if people try, they can get quail. Now, they're not going to get a bird break. But this guy, I think he texts John Mark earlier, or, late last year saying, oh yeah, went out hunting with the bird,

the dog and found a few covies. You know, he was elated. He could not have been happier. And he wasn't doing anything all that unique anymore. I mean, he's just thinned his ponds and was lighting some fires every two years. So you're basically saying that the narrative of the Bob White quail here in the Southeast, rather than the plight of the Bob White quail, it should be more of like, look at this bird that refuses to give up.

That's right. The resilience of Bob White. to hang on. Now, they've been locally expatriated from, or, you know, there's areas where you're not going to find them, whatever. There's plenty of that. So the story that I like to focus on now, yes, we need to teach the historical demise, but the fact that these things are still around with everything we put against them, I mean, it's amazing. A bird that just won't give up. Now, that's a story I can get behind. So, let's take a quick look back at what we learned this week. Bob White Quail have been kicking around on this continent for roughly a million years,

meaning they crossed paths with and outlasted animals like the woolly mammoth and the ground sloth. I still think that's wild. We used to have them in great abundance until the first notable declines in the 1890s. However, quail populations and quail hunting remained good up into the 1950s and 60s. And then due to multiple factors such as agricultural expansion, urban sprawl, habitat loss, and many others, quail declines got worse. but like we just mentioned, this bird just refuses to quit. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as bear grease in this country life. And I want to give a big shout out to Onex Hunt for making this podcast possible.

Next time, we're going to learn what the future of Bob White Quail could look like, and what people like you and me can do to help keep them around. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag, and there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors,

where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen back. Backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something.

I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.