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." 

75th Anniversary

No.  It's not our 75th wedding anniversary, although each year we get a little closer to that accomplishment.  2012 is actually the 75th anniversary "wildlife conservation".  One could argue for other beginning dates, but
1937 was a big year for American wildlife.

 The Wildlife Society (TWS) was formed in 1937.  TWS is the international society of professional wildlife biologists.  About 11,000 wildlife biologists are members, most in the U. S. and Canada.

The early 20th century was a sad time for wildlife in America.  Market hunting, the Dust Bowl, and political non-scientific resource management had brought wildlife numbers to a low ebb.  The tragic status of wildlife prompted conservation pioneers to call for a comprehensive national policy for wildlife conservation.  Led by Aldo Leopold of Wisconsin, those early conservationists drafted the American Game Policy in 1930.  This document called for a program of wildlife restoration implemented by scientifically trained professionals with a stable funding source.

The second major event in 1937 was passage of the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act (P-R) which provided funding to the states for science-based wildlife conservation from a federal excise tax on sporting firearms and ammunition.  Some have argued that without P-R wildlife populations and habitats would not have recovered.

For those of us in Missouri, we celebrate another event from 1937:  the establishment of the Missouri Conservation Commission.  This new agency came about by a citizen-led campaign to amend the state constitution.  Missouri became the first state with a non-political conservation agency with a science-based management approach and it became a model for the nation. 

Did these landmark events make any difference for wildlife?  Judge for yourself.  Missouri just completed the firearm portion of its annual deer hunting season with over 204,000 deer harvested.  In 1931-37 Missouri had a 3-day deer hunt averaging about 100 bucks harvested per year.  My grandfather was one of the lucky ones in 1937; he shot a nice buck in Carter County that year.

Illinois held its first modern deer season in 1957 with a harvest of 1,735.  The total deer harvest by all methods in 2011 in Illinois was 181,451.

Missouri was able to resume hunting of wild turkeys (my sport) in 1960.  That first hunt was for 3 days in 14 counties and the harvest was 94.  This year 40,477 turkeys were taken in the spring season for gobblers and 8,498 in the fall firearm season.

There are still many challenges facing the wildlife conservation movement.  Land use and economics are overriding factors influencing wildlife habitat, especially for upland species like bobwhites and grassland songbirds.  Wetland drainage continues to reduce habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds.  And there are many other issues to face.  But I'm glad there are wildlifers out there working on those problems. 

Ozarks Wild Harvest

A huge harvest of a wild crop is underway in My Corner of the Ozarks.  (I usually write about turkey hunting which is still important to me.)  But this time I'd like to point out the 25 million pounds of black walnuts that will be picked up by families, scout groups, church groups, retirees, and others and sold to the Hammons company from Stockton, Missouri. 

Our native black walnut grows wild in forests and towns all across the Ozarks.  According to their website, Hammons has been buying from the public since 1946.  They sell the packaged walnut nutmeat in grocery stores in 32 states.  The buying season began October 1 (same as the fall turkey season).  Folks haul their hand-picked "black gold" to one of 260 buying stations in 16 states.  We have three in our local area:  Willow Springs, Birch Tree, and Summersville.  

My dad has several black walnut trees in his back yard.  He has to pick them up in order to be able to mow his lawn.  So, he always bags them and sells them or gives them to someone else to sell.  This year's crop was smaller than usual.  And some nuts were smaller, possibly due to the dry summer we had. 

According to Hammons Products Company, 65 percent of the nation's black walnut production comes from Missouri. 

I love it when someone sees a demand, gets an idea, and has success with it.  Especially when a country family sells something to city folks. 

And that's how that wonderful black walnut flavor and crunch makes it into ice cream, sweet breads, and cakes all over the nation.