Bear Grease - Ep. 341: Backwoods University - The Future of Bobwhite

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

On this episode of Backwoods University we’ll delve into the future of bobwhite quail and their potential as a species. We will hear from quail hunter and landowner, Jimmy Bryan, as he walks us through restoring quail on his family land. Quail Biologist, Dr. James Martin walks us through the many things people can practically do to help quail and help keep them around. Everything from land management practices, such as prescribed burning and timber management, to getting involved with conservation organizations like Quail Forever, we cover it all. 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. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, I want to tell you about the future of Bob White Quail, what they need from the land to be able to persist as a species, and more importantly, what they need from us. It's late winter, and me and my good friend Jordan Blissitt are taking advantage of this good, crisp weather to go and light some woods on fire. Which is an aggressive way of saying, we're going to create some quail habitat. Is this the first time you've been able to burn in February? I burnt 10 acres about two or three weeks ago and I was it. The weather's been wonky.

The place needs a fire for the whole place for the most part. Now you may be sitting there scratching your head, asking yourself, did he just say they're going to go set some woods on fire? On purpose? So let me give you a fun task to complete. Go to Google and search nicknames for Bob White Quill and I will bet you one of the first names to pop up will be Firebird and that nickname wasn't just given it was earned earned because Bob White's evolved to

live in habitats maintained by frequent low-intensity fire we're gonna start with a back and fire pretty much running it all the way down through there to give us a extra barrier and then we can set a head to run down this way so off we went with a drip torch dripping fire we set ablaze to the 35 acre block and stayed with it until we were sure that it had burned completely through and was safely contained. This process is called a prescribed fire or a prescribed burn. And this is important, because let's think about what we learned on the last episode. We learned that we used to have a huge population of Bob White Quill and the many reasons why we almost wiped them out completely.

The bird that just won't give up, remember? They're still hanging around here. And I don't know about you, but I would like to make sure that they hang around. And this episode is all about. that. The future of Bob White's and the things that we can do to make sure that we never lose them or the hunting culture altogether. I think if we're going to have an authentic discussion about the future of Bob White Quill, then we need to talk to folks who are actively making a future for Bob White Quill. To kick us off on this episode, it's time for y'all to meet someone special. His name is Mr. Jimmy Brian, and he's from West Point, Mississippi. Mr. Jimmy saw the glory days and fall of Bob White firsthand. I find this perspective to be very valuable. He also has

walked through the process of taking a piece of land that was almost wiped of quail and quail habitat completely and restored it. And not just any piece of land, but his family land, land that he grew up hunting on and land that means something to him. Here is Mr. Jimmy. If you look at how we farm when I was a kid, you had a lot of small farmers. We don't have any small farmers left out here, three, four people on all the land. Everybody had a garden. You had two-row, four-road planters, so you had small fields, hedgerows around them. You had tenants that had gardens, and just a natural habitat for quail.

We didn't do anything delivered for quail. God just gave them to us. They took advantage of the, you know, terrain. I was in high school. And maybe prior to that, it seemed like half of the folks in Westport had dog boxes and pickup trucks and hunted two or three times a week. But I noticed after a year two, folks talked about not as many birds. And in the 70s, they said, you know, we don't have many birds anymore.

By the 80s, nobody had a bird dog. When I started back hunting, they found out I didn't have any birds. I had a wagon then. We might ride the wagon for three hours and find two covers of birds, killed two or three birds. But it was just worth it. Clearly, you don't have to hear much from Mr. Jimmy to figure out quail hunting means a lot to him. But I now want to know how he started the process of restoring quail on his property.

FYI, you're going to hear him mention someone named Dr. Wes Berger. Dr. Berger serves as the dean of the College of Forest Resources at Mississippi State University and is also a wildlife biologist with an extensive background working with Bob White's. I decided I needed to do something. So I called Dr. Westberger one day, and it was probably 25 years ago. And I said, Dr. Burger, I want to know what I need to do to bring quail back to this property. He said, well, how many coves do you know on this place? That's just 13200-acre block.

And I said, well, Wes is three or four that I know. He said, well, we populate this place if you do what I say. We spent the whole day. And I got through, I said, well, Wes, you're telling me I need to take it back to what it was in the 50s. He said, that's exactly right. Take the property back to what it was in the 1950s, and the quail will return. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising after learning what started to happen in the country in the 1960s and 1970s. But I want to know the details of it.

What did he actually do? Then I started planting a little native grass, and then West started doing research over here, on this CP-33 program, planting buffers around grain fields. We signed up everything that would fit the program that had to be. farm for the last three years. I had fits, fitz rolls around it. They were grown up in hedges. I decided just to crimped the tops out, make headroves. Put this grass buff out there. But then the year until I started seeing all kind of birds, not quail. I see red birds, just all kind of birds I never seen out here before. Then we started seeing quail. I still wasn't

happy because I couldn't go out and find ten cubies of birds. But west said, just be patient. But the next year, our numbers went up. And he started doing these cubby counts. And at one point, he said we had over the whole place, 60 or 70 cubbies to take a document. And he said, we can extrapolate that into a hundred covers. I said, well, I'm not going to believe it until I see it. And I never didn't see it. But I did see a lot more birds.

A lot of them were just covers of four or five. But we did have, what was the hundable population? So I've been well pleased that, you know, I won't live long enough to do all the things I want to do. But if you don't have something you want to do, why you need to be here. You know, that's where I feel. That's a good point.

Yeah. Mr. Jimmy's story about his land is one that I can't help but be drawn to. He saw a place that meant a lot to him, become void of something he was passionate about, and it spurred him to take action and do something about it. And that attitude alone, I think, is key for creating a future for Bob White Quill. There's also one detail about Jimmy Bryan's story that I've left out until now. His property, the one that we've been talking about, is a place called Prairie Wildlife. I've been out there myself, and I've seen it with my own eyes.

And trust me, the work that they've put into it is evident. But even more importantly, it has become one of the biggest quail and wildlife research centers in the southeast. I told West one year, I said, I'm going to name Miss Lepa's North because there are more trucks, Mississippi State trucks here than the old campus. But they were doing every kind of research in the world. Yeah. You know, quail, rats, butterflies, had folks all over the world working for them. They told me what's the best research I ever got.

It didn't cost me anything if they didn't do this. That's the reciprocal arrangements. I get to help them and they help me. But they've done all kinds of research and been a great part of it. It's a pretty incredible story. If you remember hearing from Dr. Mark McConnell in the last episode, Prey Wildlife is where he conducts a lot of research. And while we're on the subject of research and biologists, let's switch gears.

We've heard about the future of Bob White's from the perspective of a hunter and a landowner. But now, I want to hear about it from a biologist. Dr. James Martin is one of the most published and renowned quail biologist in the entire country. When I was tracking down someone to talk to for this episode, the sentiment that I got from pretty much everyone I talked to is that James is kind of the guy when it comes to Bob White Quail biology and research. So I couldn't think of anyone better to talk to about the future of Bob White Quail than James. He also wrote an article recently for Quill Forever titled Passion.

an essential ingredient for Bob White Quill Management. I want to read you an excerpt from this article because this is the first thing that I ask him about. It goes like this. A successful Quail Manager possesses numerous character traits such as knowledge, creativity, and patience. Couple those with financial resources, a land base, and in time, the dream of waving your hat when old Sam goes on point can become a reality. But having a deep-rooted passion might be the glue that holds it all time. together. I read this entire article that you wrote about passion and essential ingredient for Bob White management. Why do you think that is? That's a great question. I think we can lump

passion and love together. And those two things, you have to have it. It's an expression of value or the value that we put towards the species, the habitat they inhabit, and the people that create that habitat, the dogs that are used to find those birds, and the hunter that goes out there with those dogs to find those birds. All that love and passion is how we're going to sustain the populations we have and potentially increase the populations we have. I think without people falling in love with the bird, the dog, the habitat, the landscape, we're not going to be successful. Passion and love for the bird and its habitat are essential to creating a future for Bob White

quail. And that's not coming from me. That's coming from one of the best quail biologists in the country. Keep this at the top of mind, because later on we're going to get more into the weeds of actual habitat, no pun intended. But it all means nothing if we don't have passion and love. I'm curious about what Dr. Martin thinks is the best way to generate this passion, or if that's even possible.

We have to continually provide folks an opportunity to hear them, to see them, to see a dog that is hunting cover and finding the birds and interacting with birds. And then, you know, occasionally we get to harvest one, but that's really so far down the list of what we value as bird hunters and as bird conservationists. But it's really about all those things together. It's kind of like a triad to me, the bird, the dog, the person. All those things together is what it's going to take to establish a foundation so we can go forward. One of the things that Mark McConnell brought up, and interestingly enough, I've heard Steve Ronella say this same sort of thing when talking about bison, so different species, but kind of a parallel challenge is Mark had an incident where he had some friends of his,

had a property in Oklahoma. They were telling Mark about they were constantly flushing covey's quail as they were headed to their deer sand. And Mark was like, oh, man, that's... That's awesome. You're going to go in there and go hunt them. And they were like, you know, I guess we could. I hadn't really thought about that. And I'd heard Steve when talking about bison, you know, no one like they, that you see

a bison run across the road, you go, oh, cool. You know, it's not like if I'm driving down the highway and I see a strutton turkey out in the field, where does my head go immediately, you know? I always draw a parallel back to spring turkeys because that was like the catalyst for kind of all of this. It all started for a love for spring turkey hunting. I think about the spring woods. I think about hearing a turkey gobble.

And I think about the passion that I grew for that particular animal in the habitat and the pursuit so much that I don't necessarily have to go to what's a state I've never hunted before. Oregon. I would like to go hunt turkeys in Oregon. But I don't have to go hunt turkeys in Oregon to appreciate that turkeys are up there doing their thing. Right. But I wonder if I had never found that spark, I wouldn't know to kill. care about turkeys in Oregon. There are some people they'd see a covey, a quail, and they'd go, oh, that's cool. But connecting that to something that they could hunt and pursue and a resource that

they could enjoy, some of that's been lost. If you're of the generation, I'm 43, I call the tail end of bird hunting in the traditional sense. You were born mid-80s or later, your grandparents and your father or mother were unlikely to bird hunt. And so that's probably where the disconnection happened. If you're a younger millennial and younger, then you've probably not been exposed to it. And then we're just a different society as well. I mean, even if you set aside quail population decline

and the decline of quail hunting, there's no doubt we've changed. You know, there's been books written about the disconnection of the child in the woods. There's just a lot more distractions now. So even if you were lucky to have someone in your circle that hunted or bird hunted, and if you were close enough to huntable populations, there were just a lot of other distractions to take you away from that potential opportunity.

And then we've also disconnected people from the land in respect of the number of people that grew up working on a farm or even working in the woods in some way declined as well. We've disconnected ourselves from our food supply, from the production of fiber and whatnot. For the most part, I mean, obviously, these people out there are still doing that.

But if you're not interacting with the environment on a daily basis as part of your job or as part of your way of life, you also lose it in that way too. It's really hard for us to appreciate things we never see or never hear. It sounds to me that the idea of generating passion is not an easy task, but not impossible. 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 gobbler's, 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 Phelps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for being. beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I now want to shift the conversation a bit and begin to dive in with Dr. Martin on what Bob White Quill actually needs to be able to persist and thrive on a landscape. If someone said, Lake, I want you to put episode one on how we used to have a lot of quail and then we didn't, I want you to put it in one sentence. And I'll give you my one sentence and you tell me if you think I'm off base or not.

In the sentence, I would say, we lost Bob White Quill because we lost Bob White Quill habitat. Correct. And so moving forward and when I'm learning, talking about the future of Bob Whites, I would say, if we're going to have a future, a positive future for Bob White Quill, then we've got to have Bob White Quill habitat. Certainly. I mean, that shouldn't be controversial. It's frankly a fundamental law. By definition, habitat is the resources and conditions that are necessary for the occupancy and the survival of a particular organism.

So by definition, if you don't have habitat, you can't have this organism. It's really like the law of gravity for the, I mean, it may be even stronger than that. Habitat is essential because by definition, without it, you can't have the organism. Okay. So now we officially have essential item number two to add to our list of things we need to create a positive future for Bob White Quill. Number one being passion and love for the bird and number two being habitat. Habitat is non-negotiable. Think about it almost like trying to build a house without a foundation.

You would not get very far. And even if you did, that house would crumble and fall at the first bit of adversity. A house needs a foundation and a quail needs habitat. So now that we know the importance of habitat, I think it's equally important that we learn what good quality habitat for Bobwhite quail actually is. Just to keep it simple, we'll break it down the four parts. Cuell need four basic things. They need shrub cover, okay? And we're a little loose with our language in the conservation world about calling quail a grass and bird.

And I gives folks a little bit of a false impression of what quail are. They're either a facultative grassland bird or a shrub obligate bird. Both of those things mean that they need some shrubs and they also need some grass, okay? But the shrub is super important because that's going to provide escape cover from hawks. Thermal cover during cold events is going to provide thermal cover doing very hot events, weather events. And if you're out in South Texas, that shrub cover is really important from a shade perspective. And then some shrubs obviously provide food as well. So what I mean by shrubs is pretty much any kind of woody vegetation that is below, say, your shoulders and about the size of an old Volkswagen.

And then you need Forbes. To a lot of people, that would be just the weeds. That would be things like ragweed and partridge pee and woolly croton and things like that. And what those plants provide are food via seeds. So in addition to providing seeds, they're going to provide substrate for insects. Next, we need some grass cover. That grass cover needs to be in the form of bunches so that it's not forming a mat. So those species that form mats are like Bermuda grass, the hay grass.

So we want those bunch forming grasses like big blue stem, little blue stem, what have you, but we don't want a ton of it. And then the last thing is bare ground. Unlike a lot of other galliforms, quail or weak scratching birds. You as a turkey hunter know that if you go in the wood and you see a lot of leaves peeled back and a lot of bare ground showing that probably a flock of turkeys that come to there. You're not going to see that with quail, and so they need that bare ground to have access to those seeds that are falling from those four. All right, now we're getting somewhere. I hope y'all are writing this down because this is some good information.

Good Bobwhite quail habitat consists of four things. Number one, shrub cover. Number two, Forbes or weeds, as most folks call them. Number three, grass cover and number four, bare ground. So we have the key ingredients. But just like having all the materials to build a house doesn't magically turn those materials into a house, it's got to be built.

We now have to learn what to do with these ingredients of quail habitat. So those four things need to be present in close proximity to each other. So if we were to go out anywhere and throw a baseball or sawball in either direction, and wherever that ball land, we should be close within feet of each one of those components. Imagine yourself in a wide open landscape and you're in a spot and then you throw 100 baseballs. If you do that across a thousand different spots across a county, if more times than not, those baseballs are landing in this quail cover, then we're going to have quail. If we do that and we're only hitting quail cover on a few of those spots, we're not going to have quail. You can't just have it in one spot. You have to have it in a lot of spots.

And the cumulative effect of all that vegetation together is habitat for quail. That example really helps tie back to something that we hit on pretty hard in episode one. We talked about simplified landscape. I feel like every time I hear the word monoculture, it's tied to a negative association. to an effect on wildlife? That is the opposite of what we want to do for most wildlife species. We want to have a diverse plant community with a timing of sea production and fruit production that is spread across the entire year.

So those two things are at odds with each other. It would be very hard if farmers had to go out there and harvest corn, for example, if all the years were ripe on different days and different weeks, right? But from a quail perspective, we need plants that are going to produce food in June, July, August, September, etc. And so the plant community needs to be diverse enough that is producing food 12 months out of the year and cover 12 months out of the year and thermal cover 12 months out of the year. Monotypic plant communities can't do that. The question then becomes, how do we get it? How do we create those resources and conditions?

If we could wave a magic wand, that would be great, but that's just not. going to happen. That is the million-covy question. We understand what we need, but how do we go about getting it? What are the chances of us getting it? Maybe it's hoping for more landowners like Jimmy Bryan and Wilbur Primos to come along and willingly put forth the effort and resources to put quail habitat and quail back on their property. Maybe it's conservation organizations like Quill Forever, who's done great work over the last 20 years, spreading the story of quail and improving habitat on literally millions of acres. Maybe it's government incentive programs to aid landowners.

Maybe it's a combination of all of it. Here's one thing I do know. A guy like Dr. James Martin doesn't get the reputation he has without going through the trenches. He told me he's been focused almost exclusively on quail for over 20 years. That's 20 plus years of field work, research, working with landowners, and gaining a whole lot of perspective. In the research and conversations I had leading up to this episode,

I heard Bob White Quail hunters referred to as hopeless romantics and dreamers. But I want to know where James's attitude has been from when he started quail work up until now. I would say it's a roller coaster with a positive trend. It's one of those roller coasters that we haven't looked back around to the end yet, but we're still on the upward trajectory. There's highs and lows for sure. I've seen several cycles now of various emphasis put on quail by state agencies and federal government. And so you ride those highs and waves of the availability of financial resources.

But the constant, and I wouldn't have said this maybe 20 years ago, but the constant is the hunting aspect. The constant motivating factor is there are still people out there really enjoy running dogs on quail. and again, not necessarily the harvest part, but that part is always kind of the juice and the roller coaster, and it keeps us going, and it keeps state agencies going.

We're still headed in the right direction, I think. It does no good to be negative, right? I mean, we face the realities. We know the constraints, but we also know, in this paper is not published yet, but they're conservatively over six million quails still in the United States, which is, you know, it doesn't compare probably the tens of millions that were here in 1960, but let's just move on past that.

You know, this is what we have now. And then that's plenty to work with. We're fortunate in this country where we still have a lot of land. I've worked in other countries where every stitch of it is used for some type of production agriculture, or at least very little of it, it's available for wildlife conservation. We still have a lot of land available to us. We still have a culture that's in existence that is on life support, but it is in existence about hunting quail.

And so those ingredients we can build upon. And so we always got to keep that in forefront of our mind. Okay. Let's do a quick recap before we go into the grand finale. We learned what the process was like for a landowner to take a property void of Bob White Quail in their habitat and restore it. We learned that an absolute essential ingredient for a positive future for Bob White Quail is passion. We learned in greater detail what Bob White Quill habitat actually is, and that having that habitat on the landscape is non-negotiable if we want to have quail.

And we learned that the general attitude towards Bob White Quill persistence over the past two decades has been a roller coaster with an overall positive trajectory. My friends, we have danced all around the subject of what the future of Bob White Quill is, but the time for dancing is over, and now I'm going to be direct. I'm going to ask Dr. James Martin what he believes the future of Bob White Quill is. What is the future of Bob White Quill? Well, I can tell you this. I would not have exposed my children.

and I'm going to get emotional talking about this. I would not have exposed my children to bird dolls and bird hunting if I knew it was a dead end. I know the passion I have for it, and I couldn't imagine dangling that carrot and that love in front of them knowing that it might go away. That only leads to a broken heart. Being a father will change you instantly. it will make you never to want to break your children's heart. I think any parent has that. So I thought about it.

I mean, I had a conscious conversation with myself, like it was internal, you know, but it was conscious about if you take him, you can't take it from him. It's like you would never expose your kids to baseball if you knew the game was not going to exist in 10 years. So the best hope I can't. can give you or the best display of my hope is that I've taken my 10 year old son birdhuthing.

I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Greece and this country life. And I want to give a big shout out to Onex Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you like this episode, share it with a friend and make sure you come back for the next one because if this podcast was a quail hunt then we've only flushed two cubbies so far and the dog's already back on point. We're just getting started. We'll see y'all next Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and 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 Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.