Highly recommend the meateater podcast today. First time they have talked about the demise of the Bobwhite Quail. Very interesting findings and hope for the future.

They had a professor from Texas Tech on there. 2 biggest things that are contributing to the crash of quail are parasites. 1 is a worm that infects their eyes and another that infects their digestive system. Quail have to flush hard because they are prey for so many things most especially the Cooper's Hawk. If they can't bust or fly right due to bad eyesight and/or lack of energy thanks to the intestinal worm, then they are ripe for picking off by all manner of predators.

So, even in good habitat areas, they have seen crashes.

Hearing about those worms was gross

Agreed. I haven't listened to much of the original MeatEater podcast recently because it felt repetitive but I really enjoy it when they have stuff/experts like this guy on.

Always heard it was fire ants. LOVE seeing them to the point that I don't hunt them anymore. Such cool birds

Dale Rollins posts alot on Facebook about the eye worms. They are doing research on this at their place out by Abilene.

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I haven't listened to much of the original MeatEater podcast recently because it felt repetitive

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Same. I am not going to listen to them do a round of trivia, ever.

B-1 83, I would also add hogs to your mix of potential predators.
One could easily see a sounder of 20-30 pigs moving across the landscape hoovering up quail eggs.

The other critters, I'm not so sure. Quail evolved with them, so it seems like that should balance out. HOWEVER, the decline of native grasses & rise of King Ranch Bluestem, Klein Grass, Bermuda, etc. is hell on their habitat & diet. Plus fencelines are maintained much better than in the old days because of Round Up & other herbicides.

AgLA06 said:

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Was there any study or plan on how to treat them for these?

Quail seem to be a species that science just hasn't figured out. First it was range / grass issues. Then it was fire ants. Now worms. Either they are just doomed or I'm skeptical we finally found the answer.

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Here's a link to his website. Home - TTU Wildlife Toxicology Lab

Should have lots of information about the research they have done related to the eye worm.

The worst predator, bar none, on my caged birds is foxes. They are so good at killing in the dark, even through chicken wire. I can't even use chicken wire any more. I use hardware cloth because they can't reach through that. And there are so many foxes out there. I didn't even know we had them until I got into birds. Maybe they were always here or maybe I drew them in but they are very good at being creative when killing birds and seem to just replace each other when I kill one.

Someone sent me the podcast this morning. Fascinating and exciting to hear there may be hope!

Habitat is 90% of the battle.

Land gets carved up, people plant coastal grasses etc or Ranchers overgrazing pastures all over the state etc and even when the grass comes back if all the surrounding tracts have been grazed down there is nowhere for the birds to come back from. That's how you have whole counties populations disappear

That was interesting info. My dad and I were just talking last week about the decline we've seen in quail.

Grilled these 2 on Sunday……delicious!!

We had a bunch of quail with those eye worms at our lease in Ballinger 5 or so years ago.

I'll have to give it a listen since quail hunting is about as good as it gets for me. Love watching a point with a good dog and then a flush and shoot.

Apache said:

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I haven't listened to much of the original MeatEater podcast recently because it felt repetitive

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Same. I am not going to listen to them do a round of trivia, ever.

B-1 83, I would also add hogs to your mix of potential predators.
One could easily see a sounder of 20-30 pigs moving across the landscape hoovering up quail eggs.

The other critters, I'm not so sure. Quail evolved with them, so it seems like that should balance out. HOWEVER, the decline of native grasses & rise of King Ranch Bluestem, Klein Grass, Bermuda, etc. is hell on their habitat & diet. Plus fencelines are maintained much better than in the old days because of Round Up & other herbicides.

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certainly not an expert or even informed, but I was impressed by my SD pheasant hunt and how they kept high grasses along along all field edges and left lowlands / pond areas / cattails untouched for upland bird habitat. They had subscribed to the "dirty farming" mantra and all of that cover held birds.

I've listened to the podcast and read the literature. Eye worms are a problem but they're not the reason that quail don't exist in areas they did 30 years ago.

The medicated feed will hopefully help in places where they're already doing things (controlled burns/ supplemental feeding etc ) to help the population.

How long have the eye worms been around? How wide spread are they?
Quail have been gone quite a while in places with good habitat.

Nobody knows how long they've been around and most people think they're extremely wide spread.

And we know that there are places with eye worms that manage the range for quail that still have wild birds. Like the red hills or king ranch or the rolling plains research ranch. But we know if you graze down pastures to look like a golf course and cedar moves in that there's no quail there. And the point I was trying to make was that even in places where you have rain and the habitat bounces back if there's no birds next door anymore they're not going to be able to come back. The rolling plains has been over grazed or planted in non native grasses for decades which is the biggest problem

B-1 83 said:

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I'll even throw this wild card in here: a lack of fur trapping and harvesting. Every biologist I know says skunk and raccoon nest predation is a serious issue, and you never saw raccoon numbers like we have today 40 years ago. The deck is stacked against the little boogers in worms, ants, nest predators, flying predators…….

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True for quail and, in some areas, waterfowl. For a few years coon pelts and the meat would net you from $20 to $40 and the pelts did not have to be fleshed or stretched. Going wages in most blue collar fields was not great, I was making $2.76 to $4.65 an hour. A lot of people trapped coons or hunted them at night with those prices.

And now you see them in large groups at nearly every deer feeder due to the fur being worth almost nothing for so many years.

Is it all quail that are declining, or just the bobwhite? I have seen both around our place in southern Randall County, but it seems the blues are more common.

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And we know that there are places with eye worms that manage the range for quail that still have wild birds. Like the red hills or king ranch or the rolling plains research ranch.

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What are the numbers of quail in these areas vs. 30-40 years ago?

Do you think this guy was exaggerating the problem to push product?

The research he described gave examples of how much the population improved with the medicated feed vs. just standard or no feed on good range land. Cherry picking?

The ranches where they're doing those medicated feed studies have been in the Quail Coalitions habitat program for years. So the hope is if you're doing all those other things right then this will really help. But if you only introduce the feed and make no other changes to grazing and habitat then it's not going to be this silver bullet

one safe place said:

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B-1 83 said:

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I'll even throw this wild card in here: a lack of fur trapping and harvesting. Every biologist I know says skunk and raccoon nest predation is a serious issue, and you never saw raccoon numbers like we have today 40 years ago. The deck is stacked against the little boogers in worms, ants, nest predators, flying predators…….

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True for quail and, in some areas, waterfowl. For a few years coon pelts and the meat would net you from $20 to $40 and the pelts did not have to be fleshed or stretched. Going wages in most blue collar fields was not great, I was making $2.76 to $4.65 an hour. A lot of people trapped coons or hunted them at night with those prices.

And now you see them in large groups at nearly every deer feeder due to the fur being worth almost nothing for so many years.

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I trapped/spotlighted 'coons and coyotes from the mid '70s until the early 90s. The money could sure come in handy. For $20 'coon hides, I might do it again.

Apache said:

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This is the most informative podcast I've listened to on Meateater in forever.
I last saw Quail on our place around 2010.

If you have quail, get the product and put it out now. I wish this had been around back then.

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Habitat is 90% of the battle.

Land gets carved up, people plant coastal grasses etc or Ranchers overgrazing pastures all over the state etc and even when the grass comes back if all the surrounding tracts have been grazed down there is nowhere for the birds to come back from. That's how you have whole counties populations disappear

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Listen to the podcast. It isn't. This parasite is decimating birds on pristine habitat.
I just wonder how long it has been around & where it came from.
Also, if this parasite is spreading to other species.... how do you get it under control? Is the ultimate solution to put out Quail Guard in perpetuity everywhere? Has to be a better way.

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No doubt that the parasite is one of the pieces of the puzzle, but to say that the fact that the natural habitat no longer being around not being a prime contributing factor is just silly.

Quail used to number in the millions along the coastal prairies back aroudn the turn of the 20th century. Ample stories about how abundant they were, and ample data about hunting clubs where quail along the coastal areas were one of the main game birds. Within just a few decades those numbers were significantly reduced - at the same time, more and more of the prairie lands were converted from the natural fauna over to grazing pastures and farmland. You cannot say that was just some weird coincidence.

Today less than 1% of the original gulf prairie habitat remains, and quail are pretty rare in the old prairie regions. That's not a coincidence IMO. At the same time in those same regions you also now have huge wild pig populations, I'm sure things like coons and foxes play a part because they more or less have unchecked populations, fire ants, eye worms that we now know about, etc.

Like every other thing, it is undoubtedly a combination of multiple factors and I bet every single one mentioned on this thread plays a pretty noticieable and measurable role.

But…. There are still quite a few Se Tx large coastal area ranches still run by the same families with the basic same habitat and cattle operations over the past 60 plus years. Into the late 70s, some of the best quail hunting in the state with no quail today. Jefferson, Chambers, Harris, Liberty, and surrounding areas.
The one thing I know for sure is that birds of prey were once shot on site by hunters and are now completely protected and left alone. In the winter it's not uncommon to see many in one area.

Mas89 said:

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But…. There are still quite a few Se Tx large coastal area ranches still run by the same families with the basic same habitat and cattle operations over the past 60 plus years. Into the late 70s, some of the best quail hunting in the state with no quail today. Jefferson, Chambers, Harris, Liberty, and surrounding areas.
The one thing I know for sure is that birds of prey were once shot on site by hunters and are now completely protected and left alone. In the winter it's not uncommon to see many in one area.

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Again - and I was pretty clear about this - it is a multi faceted issue with no one thing being the single factor.

I'd also bet that those ranches don't have fields plowed to within a foot of fencelines and that the range grasses are probably somewhat similar to native fauna. When I say "gulf prairie", i'm talking the region essentially from the east side of Corpus Christi bay all the way to the Sabine, and really further east to about the Atchaflaya river.

I'm sure that the south texas/valley area has some of the same environmental changes, but I doubt it isn't anywhere near to the degree that the upper gulf coastal prairie regions have been changed.

That is the upper gulf region I included. Sabine River to Houston basically.

But even those ranches are still islands. So if you have a die off, from something like a drought or real cold snap etc there is nowhere for them to come back from.