Ozark Christmas Dinner

We had a wonderful Ozark Christmas dinner.  It's great when family can gather over a delicious meal on the holiday.  Linda presented a festive table in a room of wonderful aromas. 

We didn't have a Christmas turkey or goose.  We had a quail dinner.  By the way, it was the noon meal, not the evening meal.  That's dinner in the hills. 

My plate has three half breasts of quail.  There is no finer meat.  It was a great meal!

There are many species of quail around the world.  Ours is the bobwhite quail, more properly northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus).  The bobwhite is native to roughly the southeastern one-fourth of the United States.  In my youth quail were abundant in the Ozarks.  Many households kept bird hunting dogs and stocked up on #8 shot shells prior to each November. 

Our Christmas dinner came from a donation from our neighbor who shot his birds at a put-and-take shooting preserve.  They were "hand-reared" quail.  Wild quail are becoming increasingly rare in Missouri and all across their range.

When I was in high school in the 1960's there were 180,000 quail hunters in Missouri (MDC data).  Now there are about 20,000 quail hunters.  In 1966 the Missouri quail harvest was 3.8 million.  In 2010 only 140,00 bobwhites were taken by Missouri hunters. 

Illinois bobwhite numbers peaked in the late 1950's.  The highest number of Illinois quail hunters reported was 188,000 and the annual harvest exceeded 2.5 million in four years (IDNR data).  In 2011 13,000 Illinois quail hunters bagged 46,000 birds.

What happened?  Quail biologists are in agreement about the causes.  The primary reason was the subtle but significant landscape changes that happened over several decades.  People changed the way they used the land, mostly for economic reasons.   Those changes were a little different in different areas:  more intensively grazed pasture in southern Missouri and southern Illinois and more row-cropping in central and northern areas of Missouri and Illinois.  There were similar changes from Kansas to Florida. 

Quail need early successional habitat dispersed over a wide area.   Such habitat looks a little weedy and includes some bare ground.  Because bobwhites rarely move long distances, all their habitat needs (food, escape cover, nest cover, brood cover, etc.) must be available within the range of their normal movements. 

In a desperate effort to restore bobwhite quail numbers, a national cooperative plan and organization has been developed: 
"The National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative (NBCI) is the unified strategic effort of 25 state fish and wildlife agencies and various conservation organizations -- all under the umbrella of the National Bobwhite Technical Committee -- to restore wild populations of bobwhite quail in this country to levels comparable to 1980.

"Today, NBCI is a multi-faceted initiative characterized by three key elements:
(1) an easily updated, online strategic plan released publically in March 2011
(2) a massive and easily updated online Geographic Information  System (GIS)-based  conservation tool to help state biologists and other conservation planners identify and achieve individual state objectives within the overall national strategy. (Over 600 biologists within the bobwhite’s range participated in building this conservation tool.)
(3) a small team of specialists dedicated to range-wide, policy level efforts to bolster respective state step-down strategies."