The vanishing bobwhite
Why a beloved bird is disappearing— and what to do about it
The sound haunted me for days after my first quail hunt.
The covey had detonated underfoot and drummed into the air, then wheeled and rocketed over my right shoulder. Shaky with adrenaline, I emptied my shotgun toward the birds’ silhouettes, which flattened along a blue November sky.
My guide for the day kept a cooler head. While I wasted shells, Ray Haywood swung his gun to his shoulder, locked onto a bobwhite and pulled the trigger. The bird froze for one blink, then tumbled into the pokeweed.
By the time we flushed that covey, we’d been following Ray’s dogs for hours. We’d logged miles up and down ridges at Clay Wildlife Management Area in Fleming County, through punishing thickets, over little creeks and rocky draws, chasing the feathery tails of two Brittany spaniels.
Back at the truck, Ray cupped the hen he’d shot, gazing down at the bronze and ebony of her feathers with an awed expression. “I never get tired of looking at these birds,” he said.
The bobwhite quail was once a common game bird, thriving in brushy thickets, managed pastures and stands of native plants. But today, hunters and biologists alike have to look harder to find them. Across the commonwealth, and throughout their range, bobwhite have vanished from field and fencerow, clinging to survival only in pockets of the landscape where they can still find habitat to nest, rear brood and escape danger. While the species is not listed as endangered, its numbers have diminished each decade since the early 20th century.
The bobwhite’s most devastating enemy, it turns out, is neither a gun nor a predator. It’s a transformed landscape.
Quail are typically found in small groups called coveys. When disturbed, they flush together with a distinctive whirr, flying at speeds up to 40 miles per hour. Photo: Ben Robinson
The golden age
If quail are in trouble now, when did they thrive—and why?
According to habitat expert John Morgan, the golden age of the bobwhite quail was probably when Native American fire culture met European settlers’ preindustrial agricultural practices.
Morgan, who led a 10-year quail restoration project for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, now directs the National Grassland and Bobwhite Initiative, an organization that builds conservation partnerships among state and federal agencies, nonprofits and universities.
“Grasslands are in trouble in this country,” says Morgan, a Blue Grass Energy consumer-member.
Quail thrive in early successional habitat—the rich profusion of grasses and perennials that follow a disturbance like plowing, herbicide application or fire.
Before European contact, Kentucky’s vast grasslands were maintained by large grazing animals like elk and bison, and by fire—naturally occurring blazes ignited by lightning and fires set by Native Americans to manage the prairie. The combination left expanses that were favorable to quail.
When European settlers arrived in North America, their preindustrial agricultural practices provided beneficial forage and cover. But as machines arrived on the landscape and the human population grew, everything changed. New farming practices and tools reduced available habitat; non-native grasses overwhelmed native plants; and human fire suppression transformed grasslands into young forest.
“The Industrial Revolution pushed species to the brink,” Morgan says. “It clear-cut the eastern U.S. and plundered the land until President Teddy Roosevelt and other pioneers recognized the destruction and started turning the tide.”
A male bobwhite keeps an eye out for predators.
No silver bullets
The first signs of trouble came with the weather.
During the first week of December 1917, a massive dome of high pressure over Canada ballooned westward to meet a low-pressure system gathering power from Texas to the Tennessee valley. On December 8, the converging systems blanketed Kentucky with 16 inches of snow in Louisville and 10 in Lexington. Over the following week, thermometers bottomed out at minus 16 in Bardstown and Frankfort, and minus 20 in Taylorsville.
The Licking and Kentucky rivers froze solid, along with much of the Ohio. And as severe cold lengthened into January, vast numbers of quail starved and froze.
While temperatures eventually rebounded, quail did not. A once-in-a-lifetime weather event had eviscerated their numbers—and due to underlying habitat loss, they never fully recovered.
Following that catastrophic winter, Kentucky’s fish and game commission, organized in 1912, tried to restock the population using quail imported from Mexico. By 1930, about 100,000 Mexican quail had been released. Beginning in 1946, the newly reorganized Kentucky Division of Game and Fish created its own breeding program, which would release 3.5 million birds by the program’s end in 1989. All the while, wild quail numbers declined.
Cody Rhoden, small game program coordinator for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, says these “silver bullet strategies” failed because they didn’t address the underlying problem of habitat loss.
When the department ended its breeding program in 1989, it took a new approach—hiring biologists to focus on the private lands that comprise 93% of all Kentucky acreage. Today, the department employs 17 private lands biologists, all focused on partnering with private landowners on an array of conservation goals, including quail habitat.
“This was in the early ’90s,” Rhoden says. “Not very many states were doing this. It was very ahead of its time.”
In 2008, the department launched a 10-year quail restoration plan that sought to stabilize the statewide population and to increase bobwhite numbers in seven focus areas, among other goals. Results were mixed. Statewide, the downward trend did not change—but in the seven focus areas, bobwhite numbers stabilized or increased, highlighting both the power of habitat restoration and the need to extend its scope.
“Our footprint was not large enough to effect a big enough change,” Rhoden says. “To really enact a landscape-level change, we’ve got to get the working lands, the working landowners and the recreational landowners. … We have to find ways to get them to generate more marginal space for wildlife.”
Heather Harris and Reggie Thackston hunt quail at Peabody Wildlife Management Area.
Greener pastures
The pastures on either side of Kevin Anderson’s driveway were visibly parched in July. It had been weeks since his Madison County farm had seen substantial rain, and the grass had withered. But in two paddocks—5 1/2 acres of lush greenery in a sea of brown—it looked like spring. Big bluestem and Indian grass waved in waist-high bunches, plump-bladed and vibrant.
A consumer-member of Blue Grass Energy, Anderson planted the stand in 2019. After an admitted struggle that included multiple seeding attempts, his efforts are paying dividends.
“Once established, they’re really low input and really high output,” he says.
The native warm-season grasses are just one part of Anderson’s grazing toolkit. He still relies on cool-season grasses earlier in the year. But with root systems that go 6 feet deep in search of water—up to 12 feet, under ideal conditions—native warm-season grasses provide crucial grazing during the hottest part of the year.
They also provide important wildlife habitat. Since planting the stand, Anderson has seen increases in quail on his property, as well as an uptick in deer, turkey, rabbits and coyotes. Anderson’s planting is part of the Bluegrass Army Depot Beyond the Fence initiative, facilitated by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, the University of Tennessee, the University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service and other partners.
“Before, cattle and quail really didn’t go together,” says Anderson, who teaches agriculture at Madison Southern High School. “If you wanted your farm to be productive with cattle, you just weren’t going to have quail. But this program completely reverses that.”
The Beyond the Fence initiative focuses on “making conservation good business” by reintroducing native warm-season grasses to grazing land. These grasses—including big and little bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass and gamma grass—were the dominant grazing forage in Kentucky from European settlement into the 20th century. But over the last 75 years, many farmers have overlooked their potential as a powerful summer grazing supplement.
For too long, Morgan says, agriculture and conservation appeared to have opposite goals. But by adding native warm-season grasses into their rotation, farmers can reap business benefits from resilient grasses that thrive even in hot, dry conditions. And on the conservation side, just a small percentage increase of native grass habitat on farmland could make a difference for grassland wildlife. Morgan estimates that if just 5%–10% of Kentucky land offered suitable habitat, quail would thrive. Currently, that percentage is about 1%.
“The mere fact we still have quail is shocking. That’s how bad it is,” Morgan says. “They’re resilient little suckers.”
Indian grass is a native plant that grows in bunches, providing valuable year-round cover for quail and other small game. Photo: Rachel Cummings
How 1931 “wonder grass” remade the landscape
In 1931, University of Kentucky professor E.N. Fergus was judging sorghum at a Menifee County show when a local man approached with a tip that would transform tens of millions of acres throughout the south-central United States.
On the nearby Suiter farm, the man said, were several pastures full of a “wonder grass.” The hardy, long-lived species withstood grazing and prevented erosion. Even better, it stayed green even during cold weather.
Known today as Kentucky 31 tall fescue, the grass was tough, long-lived and had a surprisingly deep root system. And unlike native warm-season grasses, it turned green early in the year, providing valuable spring forage.
According to Garry Lacefield and J. Kenneth Evans, who recounted this history in a 1984 paper, Fergus took a pound of seed from the Suiter farm back to Lexington and planted it on UK’s Agriculture Experiment Station farm the following year.
Tall fescue is native to Europe and the Mediterranean region. The seed likely came from Virginia, the paper’s authors say, and it was probably already growing on the farm when William Suiter bought it in 1887.
Today, tall fescue covers around 5.5 million acres in Kentucky and 35 million acres across the south-central U.S.—but not without tradeoffs. The plant’s dense structure restricts the movement of species like quail, who spend most of their lives on the ground and require open plant structure to navigate their terrain. Fescue also outcompetes other plant species, overtaking food sources and tall, sturdy plants that would otherwise provide standing cover during the winter.
In addition, most fescue harbors a fungus that produces chemicals toxic to horses and cattle. The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources cites research that estimates $500 million in annual livestock industry losses due to illness caused by fescue.
A century after its discovery, fescue is a “wonder grass” no longer. State fish and wildlife experts recommend that farmers eradicate most fescue and replace it with other cool-season grasses and legumes, or with native warm-season grasses and forb mixtures.
Quail hunting memories
In our December 1983 issue, Art Lander painted poignant scenes of Christmas memories during his boyhood visits to the family farm in western Kentucky. He remembered rambling the fields and fencerows with his uncle’s 20-gauge side-by-side. In those days, the corn and soybean fields were threaded with weedy thickets and honeysuckle, and “there seemed to be a rabbit or a covey of quail in every fencerow.”
“At night, before turning in I’d lay out a clean pair of wool socks and cotton long underwear beside my coveralls,” Lander wrote. “Draped over the back of the cherry rocker was my hunting coat, each pocket filled with loaded shells. I’d leave my muddy boots in the cellar next to the coal-burning furnace, so they’d dry out and be warm the next morning.”
When the sun rose and the smell of breakfast wafted upstairs, he’d wake to spend another day outdoors.
“By night, I’d dream of flushing quail and bounding bunnies,” he wrote. “By day, I’d chase those dreams.”
Years later, the fields of his boyhood had become unrecognizable, with tidy fencerows and cleared woodlots. Modern farming, with its insistence on efficiency, had erased the in-between spaces, the intrusions of disorder, where wild things could coexist with farm life.
“I understand the economics of modern farming,” he wrote. “Still, I can’t help but feel sad that what was so important to me has slipped away.”
Read Lander’s 1983 article here.
Landowners interested in improving wildlife habitat should contact the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources at 1-800-858-1549.
