The American Wild Turkey has it's place secured in the folk history of this country. It was the traditional centerpiece of the Thanksgiving feast, which had a long tradition going back to Europe before finally being given the stamp of being a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. We've all read the stories of the early pilgrims and the deprivations they endured until the Wampanoag Indians intervened and helped them out. One of the Native American staples that they introduced to the Pilgrims was wild turkey. Benjamin Franklin even advocated for the designation of the bird as the new country's "national bird."
The Bobwhite Quail, on the other hand, has no rich history or imagery to elevate its stature among its fellow feathered brethren. It's just a quail, albeit also popular amongst bird hunters, and one that has often found its untimely demise to be followed up by a culinary reincarnation upon the dinner table. The Northern Bobwhite is unknown to half of this country...perhaps more now. It's natural range runs from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska east through the entire Midwest, South and Mid Atlantic.
The wild turkey was almost extinct little more than 100 years ago. By 1900, estimates were that only 30,000 wild turkeys still lived in the wild. The Bobwhite's decline took a little longer to unfold, but it is now just as precipitous. Since 1965, Northern Bobwhite Quail populations have declined nationally by around 70%. The unmistakable call of the Bobwhite was once as common as that of a robin. Now, it's hardly ever heard. If you have never heard one before, or if it's been quite some time since you last heard one, you can follow this link to hear an audio clip of it's namesake song (it's a short clip, so hit the replay button 3 or 4 times quickly to really get a feel for it):
http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/...
The wild turkey, I'm happy to report, has come back from the brink stronger than ever over the past several years. The Bobwhite Quail, however, faces a much more uncertain future.
Fly with me below the fold to learn more.
In 2007 the National Audubon Society released a list of the twenty most common birds in America that are threatened with population declines that threaten their continued existence. At the top of the list was the Northern Bobwhite Quail. The wild turkey was nowhere to be seen on that list. Both were once plentiful. Both faced, or continue to face, a decline from which it's hard to imagine a recovery. The turkeys made it. The Bobwhites probably won't. Why?
Hunters? Not hardly. It's the hunters who have saved the Wild Turkey. And that's not just pandering to the RKBA crowd...it's a fact. Both species are hunted, to be sure, although some states have reigned in the hunting of Bobwhites and redesignated them as both a game bird and a song bird. No...the fate of these two birds is intricately entwined with the progress of we as a people.
Turkeys were and are a bird of the woodlands. They thrive in forested areas. Their near demise had everything to do with over hunting. As early as 1844 the last observation of native wild turkeys in New York occurred. By 1900 the population, nationwide, had decreased to the point of near extinction. It was all about hunting.
Flash forward several decades to the early 80's....wild turkey populations had not only rebounded, but had surged. Why? Because, in large, the same people who had hunted them to near extinction advocated for a public program to restore their numbers. I'm not an RKBA fan, nor am I an RKBA antagonist. The story of the American Wild Turkey, however, cannot be told without a tip of the hat to hunters. They, first and foremost, noticed their decline in numbers. And it was they who rallied together to do something about it.
Today, when you buy a hunting license and add a turkey tag to it, a portion of those procedes goes to a restocking program that has developed over the years and become quite successful. The turkey is no longer endangered...it flourishes. How much so?
The last time I spent some time in the Midwest, at my uncle's home just outside of the city limits, almost everyday you could enjoy your morning coffee while looking out onto the acreage and watching a flock of a dozen or so wild turkeys grazing. Their population has gone from the millions down to the thousands, and back to the millions again. The success is such that some "city folk" now have urban encounters with wild turkeys that leave them unnerved.
For the turkeys, they just needed more turkeys on top of the ones we, as Americans, mowed down with birdshot.
For the Bobwhite Quail...also a quarry of bipeds with shotguns...it isn't so simple.
Bobwhites occupy a specific niche in the environment...one that, ironically, depends upon man. They originally thrived in the Mid-Atlantic States, where agriculture was first established. They prefer...no, they need...fencerows. Untended boundary areas that are left to overgrow. They need that high grass and brush that exists only on the periphery of farmland and woodland for nesting areas and brooding. The cover, and the seeds and weeds and plant and insect life that used to exist on the edges of every farm in the Midwest and East were their niche.
In Ohio, where I grew up, the Northern Bobwhite never migrated west until the frontiersmen did. As they cleared forests and planted fields, and as there were, consequently, bordering areas between those forests and farms, the Bobwhite Quail migrated west along with the American frontiersman. It occupied neither the woods, like the turkey, nor the fields, like the meadowlark. It's niche was small, but nevertheless widespread given the face of rural America up until the 1970's.
As farming changed...as small farms fell by the wayside and became consolidated into ever larger units...a loss of some 40 million small farms since the 1930's...a lot of habitat was lost. Today, farms pursue efficiency and productivity with the same bloodless persistency as any factory. Every inch of cropland, or potential cropland, is utilized. There are no fencerows. Crops are planted from fenceline to fenceline. Herbicides mow down unwanted growth. There is no cover for the Bobwhite Quail.
And so, their numbers have declined by 70%.
Don't look for the hunters, this time, to come to the rescue. Not that they wouldn't, or wouldn't want to. It's just not that easy with the quail. Loss of habitat is loss of habitat, and you just can't breed them in captivity and hatch a bunch of chicks and release them into the wild. If it were that easy, it would have been done by now. They tried that at first with the turkeys, by the way, and it didn't work with them either. They died.
And so it is with these quail. You can raise them and release them, but the resulting quail lack every necessary instinct for survival. Never having grown up in the wild, it seems, makes all the difference. The farm raised chicks don't know where or when to hide from predators, and they perish in the wild at alarming rates. The turkeys, when this path was first taken, faced the same fate. But later, a technique was discovered whereby wild turkeys could be captured using nets, and relocated to turkey scarce environs.
That is what reestablished the American Wild Turkey, and those efforts were a cooperative effort between state government and individual hunters, who paid a little extra for their hunting licenses to fund the effort.
But the turkey's main habitat...woodlands...is still there in ample supply. The Bobwhite Quail is up against the wall, and likely soon to be gone forever. The periphery between farm and woodland is small, and getting smaller.
If you can still hear the call of a Bobwhite on a still, summer day...consider yourself lucky. If you can remember it...consider yourself lucky.
If you have never heard the call of a Bobwhite...what can I say except that it's a damned pity. It's a beautiful sound.