Anyone done much quail hunting this year? Seems like the numbers are down from the last couple of (great) years. Any theories on why?

Not really a hunter, but I've seen pretty good numbers around home, and I've been told the numbers are good on the family land in Hale County.

2015 and 2016 were 3 clutch seasons in response to the low numbers and the abundance of food from all the rain. There wasn't as much pressure on the birds to have a 2nd or 3rd clutch this year because they had recovered so well the last two would be my guess why the numbers were lower. I've seen a lot less of the males leading the coveys of chicks this year than I did the last two. But I haven't been apart of quail research for over a year now so I may be totally off base.

seeing good numbers around both on the plains and off the cap, but it seems the coveys are spread more widely across the landscape due to milder temps so far

Birds are a good mix of mature and younger birds by our surveys.

Just a little management technique we put in place in 2012 once the birds started coming back is a 4 kill max on coveys of 10 or more birds trying to keep the numbers in each coveys north of 6 birds. It has seemed to help the winter survival once temps dip down into the single digits which is eventually coming. The consistency in covey size has shown our management is working.

Don't ever ever ever ever want to go back to the way it was in the early 2000s.

https://tpwd.texas.gov/publications/pwdpubs/media/pwd_lf_k0700_0063.pdf

A lot of people think that one hen can have multiple clutches in a single summer, but the research says otherwise. There's good information in that article^.

TPWD is not the first place to go for quail research in my opinion. There's better info here, quailresearch.org. I couldn't find the link just now to their publications on multiple hatches. Anyone who is interested in quail should subscribe to RPQRR's monthly newsletter.

Dr. Rollins is a great resource and has done some cutting age research on quail in the Rolling Plains. Very good person as well

I've seen that but I also have personally tracked a collared hen to her nest, found her two weeks later with chicks, then on another nest within a month. That may suggest the chicks didn't survive but I know they hatched at least.

Interesting. There's newer research that deals with egg dumping, community nests, and basically that quail are not near as monogamous as once thought. I would really like to link it but I can't find the link. Have you seen that? This hen could have also been sitting on another birds eggs. Or even a group of other birds eggs.