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Welcome back the Hunt Gather Talk podcast, Season Two, sponsored by Filson and Hunt to Eat. This season will focus entirely on upland game — not only upland birds but also small game. Think of this as the podcast behind my latest cookbook, Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail, which covers all things upland.
Every episode will dig deep into the life, habits, hunting, lore, myth and of course prepping and cooking of a particular animal. Expect episodes on pheasants, rabbits, every species of quail, every species of grouse, wild turkeys, rails, woodcock, pigeons and doves, chukars and huns.
In this episode, I talk with Oklahoma State University Professor Dwayne Elmore, one of the nation’s foremost quail biologists (and lifelong hunter) about bobwhite quail.
I am super excited about this episode. I wanted to find an especially knowledgeable and dynamic guest for such an important game bird, and I found one in Dwayne.
For more information on these topics, here are some helpful links:
- Here’s a link to the app Elmore has created that lets anyone report a brood of upland gamebirds.
- My go-to recipe for quail is buttermilk fried quail.
- Hard to beat Southern red-eye gravy with any sort of quail.
- Some tips and tricks on how to pluck upland gamebirds.
- Cool information about bobwhite quail biology.
- If you hunt quail, you might want to consider joining Quail Forever. I am a Life Member.
- I have several more recipes for snipe in my book Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail. You can buy a signed copy of that book here.
A Request
I am bringing back Hunt Gather Talk with the hopes that your generosity can help keep it going season after season. Think of this like public radio, only with hunting and fishing and wild food and stuff. No, this won’t be a “pay-to-play” podcast, so you don’t necessarily have to chip in. But I am asking you to consider it. Every little bit helps to pay for editing, servers, and, frankly to keep the lights on here. Thanks in advance for whatever you can contribute!
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Transcript
As a service to those with hearing issues, or for anyone who would rather read our conversation than hear it, here is the transcript of the show. Enjoy!
Hank Shaw:
Welcome back, everybody, to The Hunt Gather Talk Podcast. I am your host, Hank Shaw. I am absolutely over the moon about this episode. I am talking bobwhite quail with Dwayne Elmore. Dwayne Elmore is one of the foremost quail biologists in the United States. He’s also a lifelong quail hunter. He is an absolute fount of information. There is so much we’re going to cover in this 90 minutes that you have ahead of you, but I suspect that if you have ever chased Gentleman Bob, you are going to be on the edge of your seats for the entire time.
He is a great guest, so good I’m probably going to have him back. We go through all kinds of things, from hunting to habit to some of the great questions that involve this king of game birds. Everybody who has hunted bobwhite quail knows that there are lots of them in some places and they’ve disappeared in others, and we go through that in detail and you will get the straight dope here from Dr. Dwayne Elmore of Oklahoma State University, so stay tuned, hang on, and welcome to the show.
Hey, Dwayne. I am super happy to have you on The Hunt Gather Talk Podcast and we are going to talk about bobwhite quail today, which is arguably the most iconic American upland game bird species. You could make an argument for others, but I think they call him King Bob for a reason.
Dwayne Elmore:
That’s right. It’s a very popular and extremely widespread game bird in the Eastern part of the United States.
Hank Shaw:
This bird is the focus of your research at Oklahoma State, right?
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, it’s a big part of what I work on. Also grouse, turkey, all of what we call galliformes, which just basically means chicken-like birds, but bobwhite’s probably the one that I focus on the most.
Hank Shaw:
How did you get into it? We talked before we went on the air and it sounds like you’ve been… You grew up in Tennessee and you’ve been been in and around hunting bobwhites forever, right?
Dwayne Elmore:
Well, I grew up hunting and fishing. I spend a lot of time outdoors, but unfortunately, I grew up a couple of decades too late for bobwhite in Tennessee. By the time I was born, they were almost gone, but I distinctly remember the first time I hunted them and it really kind of grabbed my attention and something I kept thinking about. I knew I wanted to go into wildlife, and so as opportunities kind of popped up for me to work on game birds, the grouse and quail, I really tried to gravitate towards that area.
Hank Shaw:
Where did you first hunt them?
Dwayne Elmore:
It was in my home county of Hickman County, which is in Middle Tennessee on the Highland Rim just west of Nashville. Historically, that part of the world had a really rich quail-hunting culture. In fact, West Tennessee is where the Ames Plantation, the National Field Trial, and so that region is known for bobwhite, but unfortunately now, there’s just hardly any left. The one thing that really caught my attention as a budding and hopeful wildlife biologist when I was in high school, that first time that I went quail hunting, two things stood out. One, the guy that took me was the only quail hunter I knew, which said a lot for how that culture and tradition had been lost. Two, we had to drive 30 minutes to an hour between hunting spots because there was almost no habitat left in that part of the world.
Fast forward now, I can go back to those same spots. In fact, I did that last winter. I went to the first place I ever hunted bobwhite, and there’s absolutely no habitat left. It’s all gone.
Hank Shaw:
We’re going to talk about habitat because it’s a big deal and I think everybody who’s listening to this who hunts bobwhite has some theory on what’s going on with the bobwhites in his or her region.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah.
Hank Shaw:
You went to college for wildlife management right off the bat? This is something you knew you wanted to do?
Dwayne Elmore:
I did. I started at the University of Tennessee at Martin in West Tennessee, and then for graduate work I went to Mississippi State University, and eventually Utah State University.
Hank Shaw:
Utah State, that seems kind of out there. What drew you to Utah State?
Dwayne Elmore:
Well, I knew I would learn a lot if I went to a completely different part of the world, different culture, different plant community, different climate, and so I just tried to think of, “Well, what’s the most different place that I can think of in the United States from Tennessee and Mississippi?” Utah was a great place and I had a great opportunity to go out there and do a project, and so I jumped on it.
Hank Shaw:
Yeah, you’d get into a whole bunch of different birds. I hunt ruffed grouse and blue grouse up there quite a bit.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, and I was already in to hunting in a pretty big way, especially waterfowl and turkey at that point, but when I went to Utah, I finally had an opportunity for lots of upland opportunities, so ruffed grouse, dusky grouse, sage grouse, and Chukar partridge, of course. Spent a lot of time kind of learning how to train bird dogs and hunt upland game birds in that part of the world.
Hank Shaw:
Let’s start with a little sort of background with bobwhites. It’s my understanding that bobwhites were around in the original 13 colonies, so they were a bird that you would have been able to hunt in the 1600s?
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, yeah. They were really widespread as soon as the European colonists arrived. It’s debatable at what point they were most abundant. Probably they became more abundant in some areas as colonists arrived and started changing the landscape in some places probably more favorable bobwhite, but they were already well-distributed and in some parts of the country very abundant in the 15, 1600s. We really don’t have hardly any documentation about abundance until later on, especially in the 17 and then 1800s as more modern sporting firearms became more prevalent and it became a pretty important form of food and also recreation.
Hank Shaw:
I was going to ask about that. What evidence do we have of Native American hunting of bobwhites?
Dwayne Elmore:
Pretty limited for bobwhite. If you think about it, it’s not an energy-rich packet of food material. Certainly, turkey, deer, bear, elk, a lot more resources there available, not just in terms of the meat, but the hide and all of the byproducts that would come off those animals. Probably not hugely important for Native Americans. Obviously, you can trap them, you can shoot them with arrows, but really, when shotguns became more prevalent and then people had more time to just have ability to recreate and not just thinking about subsistence all of the time, that’s when the golden era of kind of bobwhite hunting developed.
Hank Shaw:
That’s probably around 1815, 1820?
Dwayne Elmore:
Really later 1800s in particular post-Civil War, especially in the Deep South. The plantations developed and a lot of that plantation culture was centered around recreation. A lot of the allure of hunting bobwhite and hunting behind pointing dogs, that’s when it really started to take off in a big way in most of the United States.
Hank Shaw:
I’ve heard that Thomasville, Georgia, they claim to be the epicenter of bobwhite hunting in the United States, that all bobwhite culture emanates from that. I’m guessing there’s just going to be a bunch of different parts of the South who will dispute that, but they seem to be super proud of their quail tradition. I think we need to talk about maybe three different bobwhite traditions.
There’s kind of the Southern plantation that we were just talking about, the Deep South, Appalachia, from all the way, really, the D.C. area all the way to Oklahoma. It’s a very different kind of bobwhite quail hunting culture. Then, I’m also interested in the northern regions. It is called the Northern bobwhite for a reason-
Dwayne Elmore:
Right.
Hank Shaw:
And you do see them in Iowa and Illinois, and at least historically, you’d see them maybe in Ohio and even Pennsylvania. That’s got to be an even different kind of bobwhite hunting tradition.
Dwayne Elmore:
Absolutely, and to touch on the name Northern bobwhite, what some people may not realize is that there are many, many species of New World quail. Those are quail that are in the Western Hemisphere in the Americas. The Northern bobwhite is one of the ones that is at the extreme northern limit of all of those species. There’s lots of species in Central and South America, including other species and subspecies of bobwhite, so the Northern bobwhite, its northern distribution is at the northern end of these New World quails so, hence, the name.
The interesting thing about it compared to some of the other quail, a lot of the quail species in the Americas have quite a bit more limited distribution. They might occur in one portion of Mexico, maybe along a mountain chain or a few mountain chains, but the Northern bobwhite, if you consider the masked bobwhite in Arizona as being a subspecies, then we’re talking about a bird that occurs from Arizona, New Mexico, so the Desert Southwest, all the way essentially into the upper reaches of New England. That is a tremendous diversity of vegetation types, of precipitation and temperature extremes, so it’s been quite a successful species.
Hank Shaw:
It’s pretty amazing when you think about that, especially now, and we can talk about, why aren’t there quail in the mid-Atlantic states or New England anymore? I suspect it comes down to habitat. You talk about bobwhite quail hunting, and I always bring up this scene in a Tom Wolfe book called Man in Full where the main character’s the wealthy Atlanta businessman and he only shoots cock bobwhites on these plantations. It’s this incredibly aristocratic thing, and then there’s the images of the horse-drawn buggies and real throwback stuff of like black servants in white clothes. There’s a whole kind of a weird eyebrow-raising for a guy like me. I was born and raised in New Jersey. There’s this whole thing about it which is just alien to someone like me, but I’ve actually been on one of those hunts in Alabama with the tall pines and it’s burnt underneath. There were tons and tons of quail.
I think you and I before we went on the air spoke a bit about my probably etiquette faux pas of whacking and stacking bobwhites in this guy’s plantation.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, yeah. Some of these places have pretty rigid kind of rules and social norms.
Hank Shaw:
All of that gets thrown out the window if you’re chasing bobs in Missouri or Oklahoma or Nebraska.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, and it’s very aesthetically pleasing to hunt on those Deep Southern plantations. There’s a reason people like to do it still today. It’s beautiful, these open pines. There’s actually research that suggests that humans have a preference for that kind of landscape with a few scattered trees and very open, but as beautiful as that is, I just got back from Kansas and hunting bobwhite on these big open prairies with scattered plum thickets. It’s a different aesthetic, but it’s equally beautiful and there’s great quail hunting in both places.
Hank Shaw:
I know. Actually, the last wild bobwhite I shot was in Western Kansas with a guy who was actually on the podcast a couple of episodes ago, a guy named Jim Millensifer, who runs the Kansas Governor’s Ringneck Classic. That’s the coolest thing about that part of the world is you can jump chickens, you can jump pheasants, and you can jump bobwhites all in the same hunt.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, and you know, one question that I get a lot from people, especially maybe somebody hasn’t been able to hunt bobwhite in a lot of different places, they’ll say, “Well, why don’t we still have bobwhite in places like Kansas and Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, kind of on the far western part of their distribution? I hear there’s quail in Georgia and Florida,” which there are lots of them in certain places, “But why aren’t there bobwhite anywhere in between? What happened to Tennessee and Kentucky and Arkansas and Mississippi and New Jersey?” We’re having to reintroduce bobwhite in New Jersey. That’s a common question that people have is, “Why not in between? What happened to all of that part of the world?”
Hank Shaw:
Is there an answer to it?
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. There’s lots of theories and lots of things that can affect bobwhite, but it really is pretty simple. Habitat has just disappeared from almost the entire country, and I go back to Tennessee that I referenced earlier. Even when I was growing up in the ’80s, early ’90s, we were having to travel, as I said, 30, 40 minutes or more just to find tiny little pockets, maybe five acres here or 20 acres here that would support bobwhite. Now, almost all of those places are gone and it’s just changing land use is what it boils down to.
Hank Shaw:
Let’s stop for a second and tell me, what does bobwhite quail Shangri-La look like?
Dwayne Elmore:
If I had to sum their habitat requirements up in one phrase, this is it and it’s really important for people to understand and get a mental picture of. They’re a shrub obligate. What that means is anywhere you find bobwhite in any kind of abundance, there’s going to be a substantial amount of shrub cover, and this is low, woody cover. That can come in a lot of different forms. It can be blackberry thickets, it can be plum thickets, it can be sumac. It can be oak resprouts after a clear-cut. It can be young pine stands or it can be blackberries under a mature pine stand, but whatever it is, there’s going to be some substantial amount of woody cover on the landscape and it needs to be low. Think knee-to-shoulder high, somewhere in that range, and generally, we’re talking at least 10% cover of shrubs, but maybe as much as 30%.
If you have that picture in your mind, I would just ask people that say, “We don’t have any quail,” say, “The next time you drive across your state or your hunting area, look around and see how much of that kind of landscape exists.” We know historically, there was a lot of that in Kentucky and Tennessee, North Carolina, all of these places. How do we know that? Well, because that landscape was getting burned a lot by Native Americans at the time of settlement.
Where I grew up, the historic fire return interval was somewhere between two and five years between fire in the county I grew up in, so that means in my county, most of the landscape was getting burned two or three times a decade. Some of these places haven’t been burned in a hundred years, so it’s no surprise that the plant community has changed. It’s reforested. The forest is now mature. There’s very little understore. There’s no sunlight reaching the forest floor. It’s just a deep leaf litter. In other areas, it’s just been plowed up and converted to crops, which can work for quail as long as they have the shrubby component around the crops, but in most places, that’s even been lost where now it’s farmed ditch to ditched, road to road.
I tell folks all of the time, when I drive from where I live now, which is Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Nashville, Tennessee, that’s about an eight- or nine-hour drive, when I make that drive, once I leave the State of Oklahoma, I can count on one hand how many fields I go by that I would even think of letting a dog run for quail. It’s just almost nonexistent, so that’s [crosstalk 00:18:14]-
Hank Shaw:
This seems to be a recurring issue in the United States and Canada, probably Mexico, too, maybe less so, but the whole practice of hedgerow-to-hedgerow or road-to-road farming, you see it in California. This is why we used to be one of the great pheasant states in the United States, but the clean farming has ruined it. You see this in Iowa. You just described in that part of the world, and [inaudible 00:18:44] kind of a loss as to why you would do that from a farmer’s perspective given the minimal returns you’re going to get on that hundred feet next to the road, which is typically not your best ground.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. Actually, there’s research out of Mississippi State that shows that by taking pretty minimal amount of production out of fields, you can actually increase bobwhite substantially. Taking these less productive areas that are shaded because of adjacent forests or perhaps areas that just aren’t as productive soil and you’re having to put a lot of nutrient input, taking [crosstalk 00:19:28]-
Hank Shaw:
Or a weird dip in your field.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, so just small changes can make a big difference, not just for quail but for lots of wildlife. The positive news is even though we’ve lost most of the quail habitat, it’s been demonstrated time and time again that with pretty small changes, but at big scales, that’s what really matters, you’ve got to do it over a big enough spatial scale, so big enough area, but you can make small changes over a large area and have a huge impact on quail.
All is not lost, it just takes a collective will from enough landowners or a landowner that has enough land and they can have quail. There’s places in Mississippi that have great quail hunting and places in Arkansas that have great quail hunting, but it is not happenstance because those property owners have made a concerted effort to turn the clock back.
Hank Shaw:
One interesting thing I’ve seen in… Full disclosure, I tend to hunt all quail west of the Mississippi, and pivots, the squared off… You know how pivot’s round and you’ve got the edges-
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah [crosstalk 00:20:37]-
Hank Shaw:
Which the pivot doesn’t hit? I’ve seen people let those go to a natural vegetation and those become little islands all over the landscape for pheasants and other upland birds.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, and you probably hunt California quail and mountain quail [crosstalk 00:20:54]-
Hank Shaw:
All of the time.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, so one thing that I should mention is, I talked about Northern bobwhite requiring shrubs, this low-growing woody cover. That’s really true for all of our quail. If you go hunt scaled quail New Mexico, you hunt them in short, dense Mesquite. If you go hunt California quail, what do you look for? You look for [crosstalk 00:21:15]-
Hank Shaw:
Manzanita [crosstalk 00:21:15]-
Dwayne Elmore:
Woody… Yeah, manzanita or woody draws through crop areas. Mountain quail are usually in big clear-cuts or burned forests where the forest is regenerating, so all of our quail are tied to this low, woody structure. That’s something really important to look for. Now, do they require other things? Sure. Quail often nest in grass. They eat a lot of forbs, such are things like ragweed and broomweed and croton, sunflower, but the shrub component is typically the thing that is missing and often the reason why you will or will not have bobwhite on the landscape.
Hank Shaw:
It’s where they hide, really, so if you’ve got none of that and they’re just in the grass, all of the birds can get them from up in the trees or in the air. If they don’t have the shrubs, coyotes or other things can run after them and get them because there’s just no way to hide.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, and beyond just predation, it’s also thermal cover, so when it gets really hot or when it’s really cold, that’s where they go to conserve energy, and so the shrub component is critical. People get really focused on the symptom and not the cause, so folks are really focused on predation. Well, there’s too much predation on quail. 80% of them die every year, so there’s very little carryover, and that’s true, but instead of focusing on, “Well, why is there so much predation?” Which is often the lack of cover. That is the easiest way and cheapest way to manage predation rather than trying to do expensive and labor-intensive trapping efforts.
Hank Shaw:
Which tend to not work. It’s been proven over and over again. You can shoot 10 coyotes and you get 20 back.
Dwayne Elmore:
It’s really hard to get a benefit from predator control. There have been instances where it’s been shown to work, but it takes a lot more effort than the average landowner is probably willing to spend, but just allowing shrubs to exist on your land and not spray them all out with herbicide, that’s cheap. That’s a cheap thing to do and anyone can do that.
Hank Shaw:
What is the picture looking like on our various public land areas? One of the things that really marks bobwhite as a specific species is, at least the majority of Eastern bobwhite quail hunting is on private ground. Public lands bobwhite quail hunting is typically a west of the Mississippi thing, at least in my experience.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, and let me briefly mention why that is, and then we’ll talk about the public hunting a little east of there, so-
Hank Shaw:
Sure.
Dwayne Elmore:
Why is it that Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas still has good bobwhite hunting? It’s primarily because the plant community, the vegetation because of the climate, which is very arrid, it’s dry, it’s hot, cold in the winter, hot in the summer, the climate doesn’t support a forest. If you go to Western Oklahoma, it’s never going to be an oak forest because it’s too dry and it’s too hot. The plant community stalls in a shrub community, so without any management activity, you just get quail habitat because of the climate.
As you start moving east, and especially as you cross the precip threshold of about 30 to 32 inches, which is about I-35 in Oklahoma, and when you hit that precip threshold and you keep driving to the Atlantic Coast, the climate will support a forested plant community. The areas that aren’t farmed and aren’t developed for housing, most of it’s become a forest. Quail aren’t a forest bird, they are a shrub bird, so that is a big part of the reason that quail disappeared from the Southeastern United States, except where there’s active management because of the economic importance or the social importance, places like Southern Georgia and Northern Florida, parts of the Carolinas.
What does that mean for a public land quail hunter? As you said, there aren’t a lot of public lands that support quail. Well, what it means is that those WMAs, those public lands that don’t support quail now, it’s simply a priority issue. There’s not quail on those areas because not enough of the stakeholders have demanded that there be quail on those areas. You could take a large WMA in Middle Tennessee where I grew up and just start harvesting a lot of trees and burning it two or three times a year. If you did that over a big enough area, you’d get quail, but unless there’s enough stakeholders demanding that, it’s easier maybe to manage for something else that doesn’t require so much intensive inputs. There can be better public hunting in the Eastern U.S., but quail hunters have to demand of it of the state wildlife agencies.
Hank Shaw:
One of the things I hear quite a bit is that the turkeys are pushing put the bobwhites, and I wondered if some of the management and habitat issues are part of that?
Dwayne Elmore:
I think what’s happened, it’s people have seen two things happening at the same time and have linked them together, which is human nature. We always look for cause and effect, so as people have seen quail decline over the past 30 or 40 years and turkey have made just this remarkable comeback, mostly because of trapped wild birds and release into areas and then regulated hunting. We’ve seen this tremendous upswing in wild turkey that corresponds to the same downward trend of Northern bobwhite.
A couple of things to know about this is that bobwhite were declining way, way before wild turkey restoration started really getting going in the ’80s. We’ve got records all the way back in the ’20s of bobwhite declining in parts of the Southeast, so this is not a new thing, but they were still pretty abundant up through the ’50s even. There has been research looking at turkey food habits, and a turkey will eat anything they can catch. If they can catch a bobwhite chick, they will, but there’s no evidence that they’re killing any substantial number of bobwhite.
In fact, if you look at some of the places that we still have the highest bobwhite numbers, places like Texas and Oklahoma, we have some of the highest turkey densities of anywhere in the country. Just through-the-roof densities of wild turkey and bobwhite occurring on the same property. If we just look at this kind of cumulatively and the long-term trends, there’s really just not any evidence of wild turkey are causing any kind of quail declines anywhere in their distribution.
Hank Shaw:
I can actually, at least from a western perspective, tell you that some of the best places to hunt California quail are where millions of Rio turkeys are wandering around as well.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, and part of the reason for that is turkey and quail have some overlapping habitat requirement. Not entirely because wild turkey do require trees for roosting, but outside of roosting, wild turkey kind of use a similar plant community that quail do. They need that herbaceous, that mix of shrubs and grasses and forbs. If you’ve got a landscape that’s been actively managed with fire or timber harvest or, if it’s dry enough that it just stays in a shrub community like Oklahoma and Texas, you’re going to have turkey and quail on the same landscape.
Hank Shaw:
Hey, everyone. I’d like to take some time to thank Filson, the original Alaska outfitter, for sponsoring The Hunt Gather Talk Podcast. As you may know, I am rarely out chasing upland birds without my Filson jacket and tin cloth chaps. You should know that Filson was founded in Seattle, Washington, in 1897 when they started outfitting prospectors for the Klondike Gold Rush and ever since then they’ve been committed to creating the best-in-class gear for the world’s toughest people in the world’s most unforgiving conditions.
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I hear about random diseases, too. You talk to somebody about like eye worm or this or that or the other thing, and my impression when you hear stories about that is that, “Well, the local population of bobwhites and X or Y spot when diseases are happening are probably stressed because of poor habitat or poor food or a bad spring or whatever.” Is that about right?
Dwayne Elmore:
There are a lot of diseases that quail can get and some of them we’ve known about for a very long time, including eye worms. We’ve known about that. It’s an ectoparasite that gets in the eye, as the name suggests, and it affects lots of birds. It’s not just quail. Many, many species of birds get eye worms, and there’s different species of eye worms, some that are more specific to certain species of birds. There’s even eye worms that occur in people, and obviously, it can be an irritant, can cause vision impairment, but there’s no evidence to date that it’s linked to any kind of population declines.
Now, there are people working on that to try and get a better idea of, can it be a stressor on birds to the point that it causes increased mortality? There is research ongoing, but I’ll say to date, we don’t have any evidence that that’s the case and we’ve known about this disease since at least the ’50s, so even back when bobwhite were crazy abundant everywhere, we had eye worms. In fact, some of the old accounts of eye worms in quail, the numbers of eye worms recorded in the quail are about same as what we see today. To date, there’s no evidence that that parasite is a problem, but certainly diseases can create stress on birds.
Often, these diseases are associated with birds that are in otherwise poor health. Not necessarily ectoparasites but internal disease. Often can be birds that just are generally not fit, that don’t have enough nutrition. It’s a complicated thing, but there’s nothing out there that we can say is a smoking gun as far as a predator or a parasite or a disease. The only thing that every research study that has ever looked at bobwhite… All of these studies can agree on two things, really, that weather is important. Weather drives bobwhite populations, and habitat. If you lose that shrub component, you’re just not going to have quail no matter what you do.
Hank Shaw:
One last bit on habitat and biology before we move to hunting is, have organizations like Quail Forever and the like… What are they actually doing? I also want to kind of as a caveat to that because I think the easiest thing if they are doing a good job, is it something that a regular Joe chip in your 35 bucks and help out and do your bit for the whole aspect of what can non-governmental agencies do through organizations like QF and what individual people can do?
Dwayne Elmore:
The individual hunter or just concerned citizen can do a lot for quail. I am a big proponent of people finding an NGO, some non-governmental organization, that they feel drawn to and get involved because these groups, as I said earlier, in a lot of parts of the country, what it’s going to take to get better habitat at a big enough scale is going to be stakeholder groups that have a voice. The wildlife agencies, they’re tickled to work with these groups of people that come up and say, “What can we do to help? Where can we assist your mission? How can we partner with you?” Wildlife agencies want to be engaged with stakeholders and a lot of groups like the National Wild Turkey Federation have been extremely successful at organizing turkey hunters around a cause and raising money and focusing on turkey management on public lands. They’ve done a great job.
Groups like Pheasant and Quail Forever also have and they’re growing. More and more quail hunters are starting to get involved and letting their voice be heard and really trying to focus on things that we know matter like habitat. In places like where I grew up in Tennessee, that’s what it’s going to take. I’m actually optimistic. I know a lot of people aren’t, but I do this for a living. I study quail and I know the science. I’ve been involved in and I know it’s actually pretty easy to manage quail. Despite what everyone says, it’s not hard to grow quail. We can do it, we just have to have the collective will to do it at big enough scales. I think the tide’s turning in a lot of places. I’m encouraged by what I see an the NGOs are going to play a major part in that.
Hank Shaw:
That’s really good to hear. Let’s keep throwing out the quail folklore now. One of the things that you always hear is only shoot one or two birds out of a covey and don’t hunt that covey again. There’s a lot of ritual involved with bobwhite hunting that you sort of see in the Western quail, but you really see it with bobwhite quail. Covey shooting is one and then I get the sense… My experience with hunting quail, again, it’s more western-focused, and I noticed that most if not all of the Western quail have kind of a weird stuttered flush, where bobwhites act more like Hungarian partridge where’s it’s all like… and they all just kind of go and there might be one hanger, but that’s about it.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, particularly when the covey is tightly grouped together that you’ll see this very synchronous flush. Sometimes when the bobwhite covey is spread out feeding, it’ll be more popcorn-like, but you’re right, when the covey is in a central unit, they almost act in unison. There’s a lot of evolutionary reasons for animals to act that way. Lots of things group up, whether it’s muskox or bobwhite, so if you’re worried about predation, being in a group, there is this safety in numbers. If a predator comes in your vicinity, this crazy, erratic flushing or fleeing in multiple directions, it’s very confusing, it’s very distracting. I mean, everybody [crosstalk 00:36:35]-
Hank Shaw:
You’re damn right it is.
Dwayne Elmore:
Everybody that shoots quail knows what I’m talking about. It’s really hard to pick out a bird, so there’s a survival benefit to being in a group like that. Also, warmth. The quail at night, they’re setting adjacent to each other with their butts together and they’re sharing body heat, so instead of all of that body heat just being lost to the environment, it’s being shared with your neighbor and you’re [crosstalk 00:37:00]-
Hank Shaw:
That’s a really cool thing I learned about that. It’s basically exactly like what muskox do in the Arctic winter is all of the quail kind of form a wagon wheel and look outside, look for things to come after them.
Dwayne Elmore:
You’re right. They’re sharing heat and they’re also at an advantage if something attacks the covey at night, that it’s going to be a little more distracting from them all flushing in different directions, so there’s a lot of survival benefits to doing that. It makes sense, then, that hunters would say, “Well, we shouldn’t shoot birds below a certain size,” and eight seems to be the number that most people have gravitated on, but let’s just say that not all coveys are eight birds.
That fluctuates a lot, not only between years, depending on how many quail are on a landscape, but also even it can fluctuate daily. These coveys are dynamic, and I think that’s one thing that maybe not everyone appreciates and until you put radio transmitters on a bird and follow it around a lot, you don’t always realize how dynamic these covey groups are. These birds [crosstalk 00:38:07]-
Hank Shaw:
I sure didn’t. I was always under the impression, especially by mountain quail, that a covey’s a covey’s a covey, and if you shoot that covey down, you basically ate your sea corn in that spot.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, so now, if there was only one covey on a property, if you know, “Okay, I’m hunting this property and there’s only one covey there,” well, sure, it makes sense not to shoot too many of then, but if you knew, “Well, there’s coveys all over this landscape, they’ve very connected and they can move between each other,” then it starts to not make as much sense. That’s what we see with quail is that they do move. If you went out… Let’s say you were going to shoot a 10-bird limit of quail in a state and you go out and you shoot one bird out of 10 coveys or 10 birds out of one covey.
Does that biologically matter to the quail? Well, it would only matter if you shot out a percentage of the population on a property, so in other words, if you went to a property and it only had 10 birds and you shot all 10 of them, they’re gone. You’ve blinked out. Now, you’ve got to get immigration from another property, but if you go to a property and there’s a thousand quail, so they’re very connected and there’s quail across the landscape, it doesn’t matter how you shoot them. You can shoot two out of one covey, five out of another because those coveys are going to regroup, and they do that a lot more frequently than most people realize. What I’m getting at here is not so much how many you shoot out of a covey. It really boils down to how many you shoot out of a population. That’s what matters.
Hank Shaw:
How [crosstalk 00:39:51] can you as a hunter guesstimate that?
Dwayne Elmore:
That’s tougher. If you know you’re hunting isolated properties, like let’s say you’re hunting in parts of Kansas where you’ve got a covey next to a farmstead and it might be a mile or two miles down the road before you have another suitable quail habitat, then, it starts to matter a little more. If you’re hunting a big wildlife management area that’s 30,000 acres, the whole thing is quail habitat, it’s not going to matter nearly as much, but if you’re hunting on your own property and you’re wondering about this, “Well, how many covey do I have?” The best thing to do is to you can fall covey counts, which basically means you go out in the morning in usually October, and at first light you listen and determine how many different coveys you have calling.
If you do that over a few mornings, you can generally get a pretty good estimate of the number of coveys on that property, and then if you flush a few of them, average the number of birds that you’re flushing, multiply those two together and you can get a rough approximation. It’s not precise, but it should be in the ballpark. You get a rough approximation of how many birds you have. Then, as far as how many of those can you shoot, most of the research suggests that in a population, if you’re shooting certainly under 20%, maybe under 15% of the population, it’s going to have minimal to no effect on the next year’s standing crop. If you’re going out and you’re shooting 25, 30, 35% of your total number of birds, there’s a good chance it could affect next year’s standing crop of quail.
What I do personally on property that we hunt, that we manage, I’m trying to only shoot about 10% of what I think is on that property, assuming that there’s going to be some crippling loss that I didn’t account for.
Hank Shaw:
I will freely admit, and people who follow this podcast know, that I do not have a dog. I hunt so many places and travel so much that I feel it would be unfair for me to have a gun dog because I can’t take them anywhere. Well, let me tell you how I hunt quail without a dog.
Dwayne Elmore:
Okay.
Hank Shaw:
I wander around and a bird flushes and I shoot one and I walk immediately to it and then I pick it up and then I go and find another one, and then so on and so forth. You put in a whole bunch of miles and I always wear like… I have like Filson tin cloth everything because, at least in the West, the universal law is that all quail shot in the West must immediately find a briar patch and fall right into it.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah.
Hank Shaw:
I’ve spent 30 minutes looking for a downed quail in blackberries. It’s not super efficient, but it works for me and I don’t lose that many birds.
Dwayne Elmore:
Isn’t it gratifying when you find that bird?
Hank Shaw:
Oh, especially in the brambles. You see the one feather and like, “Okay.”
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, I mean [crosstalk 00:43:06]-
Hank Shaw:
They tend to just die. I don’t find a lot of floppies. Grouse, they twitch in the leaf litter, so you can see them, or at least hear them and get a bead. Quail just tend to die and it can be much harder to recover them without a dog.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. It’s usually a really short little death flutter that they might have, and if you’re not just right on top of them immediately after they fall, you’re not going to hear it. It’s so frustrating to lose quail, whether you have a dog or not. It happens and it just really is disheartening to lose a game, so I commend you for your efforts to retrieve those downed birds. That’s really important.
Hank Shaw:
It does prevent me from shooting doubles. Oh, I did shoot a double. They flushed out under like [inaudible 00:44:00] field, so when they fell you could see them both right there, but-
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah.
Hank Shaw:
That’s a rare occurrence.
Dwayne Elmore:
It’s hard to shoot a double. It’s a challenge even if you’re trying. Dogs is something that, as you said earlier, everybody has a different opinion on. I try not to get too deep into that because I have my bias and everybody has their own bias. At least for me, what it boils down to is I started with German Shorthairs and I’ll probably end with German Shorthairs. I just have an affinity for them because that was my first bird dog.
Hank Shaw:
It’s [crosstalk 00:44:38] a big, big bird dog here in California, too, because of the heat.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, yeah, and they have a lot of good attributes, although… I was trying to hunt woodcock yesterday and trying to keep a big, running German Shorthair close enough to hunt woodcock effectively. I was wishing I had an English Setter. There are days when I rethink my decision, but overall, I love them because that’s what I started with. I think [crosstalk 00:45:06] that’s the way it is for a lot of people.
Hank Shaw:
The woodcock, I always outhunt people with dogs when I hunt woodcock without a dog just because I can.
Dwayne Elmore:
Is that right?
Hank Shaw:
I cover my ground, I kill more birds.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah.
Hank Shaw:
The dog is doing all of this [inaudible 00:45:19] like, “Oh yeah, he’s pointing somewhere. I have no idea because I’ve got this beeper thing and in your woodcock thicket and it’s like, “I don’t know where this dog is.” Then, you hear… and the birds fly away. Plus, I have like… This is also sort of non-dog hunter thing. I have stage fright. If I’m walking up on a super… Especially if it’s a pretty pointing dog and it’s like, “Zing!” You got that classic Berlin [inaudible 00:45:44] kind of painting point and like, “All right, release the dog,” and then the bird flies up on its… and that’s it.
Dwayne Elmore:
Absolutely.
Hank Shaw:
If it just comes out of like the corner of my right eye, I’ll swing and kill it almost every time, and so it’s thinking versus not thinking.
Dwayne Elmore:
So much of wing shooting is just it’s a mental game. I always shoot better when I’m hunting over somebody else’s dog because I’m not worried about if their dog has style or if their dog is going to flush the bird. If it’s my dog, I’ve got one eye on that dog the entire time and not focused on the shooting, but if I’m shooting over somebody else’s dog, oh, I look like a champ. I can shoot really well when my dog is not in the equation.
Hank Shaw:
Let’s take breeds away from the dog for a second so we don’t cause fights among the audience. What are the attributes of a really good bobwhite quail dog? Are they different from the attributes of some other game bird that you’re chasing?
Dwayne Elmore:
They are different, and some of them are different, which is why I think it’s hard to have one breed of dog that does everything perfectly because these game birds are so different. The cover they’re found in is different, the scent they put out, their behavior, whether they run or don’t run. For folks on bobwhite, I think you need a dog that can cover quite a bit of ground. Maybe not as much as like if you were hunting Chukar, but a lot of ground, so-
Hank Shaw:
Well, Chukar’s the extreme, I think.
Dwayne Elmore:
Oh, yeah. It’s hard to have a dog that runs big enough if you’re hunting Chukar, but for bobwhite, generally, we want a pretty big running dog, especially in the western part of their distribution. As you get more in patchy types of color, maybe in parts of Eastern Kansas, maybe you don’t want a dog so big, but my personal thought, and I’ve hunted bobwhite from the far west part of their distribution in New Mexico all the way to the Atlantic Coast, is I feel like the perfect range for bobwhite is about a hundred to 200 yards. If you’ve got a dog that is mostly spending its time a hundred to 200 yards from you, that’s big enough to cover a lot of ground, but not so big that you’re losing track of it and it’s running off the property that you’re hunting.
The next thing that’s important in a bobwhite dog is that they’re staunch, which means once they hit the scent, they’re going to be really steady there because a lot of times, especially the places you hunt bobwhite, they might not be detecting the scent from a long ways away. Often, Chukar hunting, you’ll see dogs wind a Chukar covey from maybe over a hundred yards and then track it, but usually with bobwhite, when they hit that scent, the quail are probably in gun range of the dog right away.
A dog that will kind of lock down and not try to creep too much is pretty important, and then a dog that is a good dead bird finder. As you mentioned, it can be really hard to find these quail. They’re small, they’re cryptic. They often fall in dense brush and unless you step on them, you often can’t see them, and so a dog that not only has the ability but mostly just the desire because not all dogs want to look for dead birds, you know [crosstalk 00:49:15]-
Hank Shaw:
Drive me batty. I’m like, “Why are you here?” I know.
Dwayne Elmore:
They [crosstalk 00:49:19] want to [crosstalk 00:49:19]-
Hank Shaw:
Why am I [crosstalk 00:49:19]-
Dwayne Elmore:
Try another covey, and it’s okay if you’ve got a mix of dog, if you’ve got one dog that wants to find the covey and another dog that wants to find the single, but if you’re trying to wrap all of this up in one package, you really need a dog that is going to hunt dead birds and be really persistent about it. I think those are probably the three most important traits from my perspective.
Hank Shaw:
A classic would be pointing birds, but what about labs and other flushers?
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, they can sure do it. A flushing dog, I think particularly when you’re hunting places where the bobwhite habitat is more concentrated or more predictable, so in other words, if I was going to hunt isolated farmsteads in Kansas where you could kind of drive and say, “Oh, there’s a woody draw, there’s probably going to be a covey there,” or, “Oh, there’s a patch of shrubs in the corner of that field,” those are places where a flushing dog can really shine.
The places where you’re probably going to be at a little bit of a disadvantage is like if you’re hunting a big piney woods of North Florida or the big open rangelands of West Texas where the quail could be anywhere because the whole place is habitat and it’s hard to really know where they’re going to be. There, you just have to cover so much ground and it just becomes a miles game. You can still have great hunting, but you might not find as many coveys in that situation with a flushing dog that stays close. Having a flushing dog for singles or to find dead birds, and a lot of those plantations have labs or Cocker Spaniels or things like that to help flush the birds or to help find the dead birds after the pointing dog has found the covey.
Hank Shaw:
The cleanup crew?
Dwayne Elmore:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), and that’s really effective.
Hank Shaw:
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As far as gear, because of the whole briar thing, I generally will wear tin cloth hear and there and just a vest because most of my quail hunting, it’s super hot, so just a webbing kind of a vest. Then, good hiking boots. I shoot a 20-gauge over and under and I typically will shoot steel sevens at them, but lead eights or lead sevens are also good. I don’t know if you go through anything different?
Dwayne Elmore:
It’s personal preference, but I like really lightweight small gauges. I like 28-gauge, no more than a 20-gauge, and not that there’s anything wrong with the 12-gauge, but it doesn’t take a lot to kill quail and I like a light gun because I’m going to be walking a lot of miles, so a light 28-gauge is nice at the the end of the day. I shoot steel as well, number seven steel. It’s plenty. It’s all you need to kill a bobwhite and, I guess, other than what you mentioned, the thing I think is really, really critical is a blaze orange hat-
Hank Shaw:
Oh yeah.
Dwayne Elmore:
Because I’ve hunted a lot of different things in a lot of different places and almost every close call I’ve seen happen has been quail hunting. It’s very inherently dangerous because you’re usually hunting with a group. You’re shooting-
Hank Shaw:
Cue Dick Cheney joke.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, you’re shooting at birds that are flying very low, often through brush, in a group. It’s confusing and it’s distracting and you need to be able to quickly identify where all of the other hunters, so please, wear a blaze orange hat when you’re quail hunting.
Hank Shaw:
Yeah, I think that’s good advice with really almost all upland hunting in general no matter where you are because the blaze on the top of your head helps a lot for what you just mentioned, and especially if you’re in deeper stuff, like woodcock or rough grouse or even rabbits.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yep, absolutely. Often, the hat’s the only thing you see on the other hunters. They’re buried in brush and that might all you’ve got. When I hunt in groups, we talk a lot. It’s not generally going to scare the quail that much and we’re keeping communication. In thick brush sometimes, it just means you don’t have shots. If a bird gets up and you don’t know where the other hunters are and you can’t see them, then just don’t take a shot. It’s not worth it.
Hank Shaw:
Where’s your stance on the old Arkansas or skillet shot?
Dwayne Elmore:
I’ll be honest with you, the only bird that I feel no guilt about shooting on the ground is a Chukar. After they [crosstalk 00:54:59]-
Hank Shaw:
Hateful gray birds [crosstalk 00:55:01]-
Dwayne Elmore:
Oh, they’re very hateful and, yeah, I don’t feel bad about shooting one running, but anything else, no, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to shoot a quail on the ground and I would never shoot a rough grouse on the ground or out of a tree. Other people have different opinions about that and I’m not judging, but personally, I don’t find it satisfying. I’m out there for the… I like to eat them, but ultimately I’m doing it because I enjoy it and, at the end of the day, I want to walk away from it and feel good about how I did it, not just what I did, but how I did it, so-
Hank Shaw:
Have you ever hunted mountain quail?
Dwayne Elmore:
I have.
Hank Shaw:
You waited that long to find out mountain quail actually flies, eh?
Dwayne Elmore:
You know, I’ll tell you a quick story. The first mountain quail I ever killed, I was so frustrated. I’d hunted for two or three days. I had seen mountain quail, I had heard mountain quail. I had not gotten a shot and I was literally driving to the airport. I was done and I had not shot a mountain quail and I was really frustrated. I’d worked very hard and hadn’t gotten a shot. I’m driving off the mountain, a covey runs across the road in front of us-
Hank Shaw:
Of course they do.
Dwayne Elmore:
And I stopped, parked, grabbed the shotgun, ran down the road and I could hear them running through the brush off an embankment. I didn’t even think about life or limb, I just jumped off the embankment right in the middle of them. I couldn’t see them, but it was about shoulder-high brush. It was a big wildfire and the forest was regenerating, and when I jumped in the middle of them, they just panicked and they all flushed up in the air and I killed two. I was so happy. I actually finally got a shot and drove off the mountain with two mountain quail, so they’re tough. Anybody-
Hank Shaw:
Oh yeah.
Dwayne Elmore:
That’s never hunted them, I think of all of the quail that we have in North America, they are the hardest to hunt.
Hank Shaw:
Indeed. I’ve never, ever shot more than four in one day, and I believe the limit’s eight or 10. The limit’s 10, actually, but good luck getting 10 mountain quail.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, that’s kind of absurd I would think most of the time. The thing about mountain quail, they always tell people, “It’s like imagine hunting a place that’s as thick as what you would hunt woodcock or rough grouse in, that dense vegetation, but on steep slopes like you would hunt Chukar in.” At least in my experience, that’s been where you find mountain quail, so it’s-
Hank Shaw:
It’s 6500, 8500 feet.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, but beautiful country and a beautiful bird and well worth the effort.
Hank Shaw:
On bobwhites, I get the sense that there is probably not a more ceremonial bird in American uplands hunting tradition.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. Probably some of the rough grouse folks would argue that, but-
Hank Shaw:
That’s a fair argument.
Dwayne Elmore:
You know, it’s such a big part of the country that has this tradition of hunting bobwhite. If you look at their distribution, it’s just a huge area that they historically occurred in. Back when there wasn’t a lot of big game, when a lot of the whitetail and wild turkey had mostly been extirpated and small game was king. A lot of people grew up in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s hunting things like quail and rabbit, so there’s that part of it, but there’s also these plantations and the culture of firearms and dogs and horses and mule-pulled carriage or wagons, just all of this kind of ethos that came up around bobwhite in the southern part of their distribution.
The only thing I can kind of compare it to is maybe what you would have with red grouse in Scotland. It’s more than just the bird, it’s this almost lifestyle that surrounds hunting bobwhite. I think that makes them special, but I also would say as special as it is to hunt on those plantations, it’s also special just to hunt bobwhite behind your house in a little woodlot. For most of us, that’s how we grew up thinking of bobwhite. That’s part of it, too, so it’s a special bird, culturally very important and worth keeping around.
Hank Shaw:
I will tell you the story I think I told you before we got on the air about. I got invited to hunt one of these plantations in Alabama. I’m a Western bird hunter, and so we’re on the hunt and there’s three of us and birds are flushing and I’m just absolutely pounding them. I know that the limit’s 10 and I’m like, “I want to shoot my 10 birds because this is one of the very few situations I think I’ve ever been in where I had an opportunity to actually shoot a limit of 10 birds.” Usually, a good quail hunting day for me is four or five maybe. The birds are just flushing like, “Ba-boom!”, and like doubles and it’s like, “Yes!” I’m just over the moon.
After I got about six of them, I started to feel this stink eye from my compadres and I got this vague sense that I wasn’t supposed to shoot 10, but you told me off the air that I was definitely right, that I should not have shot 10.
Dwayne Elmore:
Well, you know, if you come from a place where you maybe didn’t have a lot of bobwhite or you didn’t have a lot of chance to shoot bobwhite, I think that’s everybody’s initial reaction is, “Oh, I’m going to make hay while the sun shines. I’ve never had this opportunity.” A lot of those plantations where they have very well-managed quail every year and can move huge numbers every day, then these cultural or social norms start popping up to limit success. We do that with lots of things.
You think about a deer hunter that has shot lots of great deer and over their career they maybe start to restrict themselves. “Okay, now, I’m just going to use archery. Okay, now, I’m just going to use primitive archery.” Or, “Now, I’m just going to use bows that I made myself.” It’s kind of almost a natural progression that a lot of hunters go through, and a lot of that has popped up in bobwhite on these plantations where it’s like, “Okay, now, we’re just going to use 28-gauges and we’re only going to put two shooters down at a time, and we’re only going to shoot two birds out of the covey. Not because it biologically matters, but because we want to place limitations and we want to keep this special and not just shooting lots of birds. It’s not about shooting the birds, it’s about the experience.”
Those things happen on those plantations and I think for some of us that didn’t grow up in that setting, it’s a little bit of shock the first time you go.
Hank Shaw:
For sure. Let’s move on to the actual reason, the main reason at least why I hunt, which is to at the end of the day is to eat the birds.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yep.
Hank Shaw:
It’s not the only reason, but it’s what got me into this pursuit. I have found that of all of the birds, and I believe I have plucked every game bird in North America except for the rails. I have not yet plucked the rails because I have not yet shot the rails. I find the quail in general to be the most challenging to pluck. I have a trick which works very well, which is you shot your quail for the day and you get them as cool as possible as fast as possible. Don’t stack them up, and if it’s hot out, you put them in a cooler over the ice, not in the ice and not wet. Then, you move them when you get home and you put them in the refrigerator in a paper bag or a plastic bag.
If you have children out there, make sure that their heads are facing out at the children’s eye heights so they freak out when they open the refrigerator when they’re not supposed to. Sit them there for two to three days, just whole and in the feathers. They’re not going to go bad. They’re very small. They don’t have a lot of thermal inertia to keep interior body heat warm. Then, I find that… Let’s say hunting is on a Saturday, if you pluck them after work on Monday or on Tuesday, the plucking goes infinitely easier because the vast majority of people will try to pluck any upland bird exactly when they shouldn’t, which is to say the evening after the hunt or the morning after the hunt when the bird’s feathers are still sticking to it like crazy.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, so are these birds… Do you gut them before you [crosstalk 01:04:00]-
Hank Shaw:
I do not because it’s nearly impossible to properly pluck a bird that’s been gutted.
Dwayne Elmore:
I see, okay.
Hank Shaw:
That trick has served me well for years, and for those of you who are like carpenters or engineers who build bridges or are professional wrestlers, the chances are if you’ve got big old giant meat hook hands, it’s tricky. You need some finesse to pluck a quail. One piece of advice I have, again, with all upland birds is that there are two kinds of feathers on every gallinaceous, or chicken-like bird. They’ve got little teeny dark underfeathers, which are very easy to pluck, and then they’ve got the display feathers that make the bird look like it does. They tend to stick harder and sometimes you have to go feather by feather, but if you think about that and just go, “Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping,” and not try to grab six feathers at once, you’re going to go a long way to not ripping that bird.
Dwayne Elmore:
I’m going to remember that. I’m going to try it.
Hank Shaw:
You need to because a skin-on quail, no matter what species it is, is one of the greatest things in the wild game world to eat.
Dwayne Elmore:
Do you also leave the skin on even if you were deep frying? You would still [crosstalk 01:05:15]-
Hank Shaw:
Oh, especially.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, okay.
Hank Shaw:
That’s the skin underneath the fried chicken that’s the best part.
Dwayne Elmore:
Absolutely.
Hank Shaw:
I have not found a ton of flavor difference between the species of quail. Have you?
Dwayne Elmore:
I can’t tell the difference. I’ve never had the opportunity to have them all side by side, but I’ve certainly eaten Gambel’s and scaled quail together, and I’ve eaten scaled quail and bobwhite together and I couldn’t pick them out. No, I can’t tell a difference.
Hank Shaw:
I think the general rule of quail, and you tell me if I’m wrong, is that they generally are wandering around eating little green things, but primarily seeds of various sorts and occasionally some berries.
Dwayne Elmore:
Well, seeds and berries are fruit certainly in the fall when we hunt them, but for most of the year, insects are the bulk of their diet. If insects are available, they’re always going to gravitate towards insects, but when we shoot them in the fall and winter, insects generally aren’t available, so what we find in their crop is seeds. Like bobwhite, from probably in March through October, they’re primarily eating insects.
Hank Shaw:
Interesting. I know that when I hunt Mearns quail in Arizona, there’s this super pretty little brightly colored beetle that they can’t get enough of. They mow on that thing forever. These are a particular kind of insect that you’re going to find in bobwhites a lot when you hunt them?
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. They eat a lot of caterpillar, so like Lepidotera larvae, the larvae of moths and butterflies. That’s an important one. Also, grasshoppers, very important. Now, some grasshoppers are pretty big and not as attainable for a bobwhite, but if they can kill a grasshopper, they’re going to go for it every time. Beetles, you’ll find quite a few beetles in their diet, but probably the two most important are the grasshoppers and the caterpillar.
Hank Shaw:
The grasshoppers are huge for sharpies and prairie chickens, too.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, almost every game bird, that’s just such a critical food resource. If you’re thinking about growing food for quail, we think a lot about things like milo and the seed-producing crops, but what you really need to be thinking of since 80% of the year they’re eating insects, is, “Well, what do grasshoppers need? How can I produce more grasshoppers?” That kind of changes the way you think about food resources for quail.
Hank Shaw:
Well, okay. What do grasshoppers need?
Dwayne Elmore:
Herbaceous vegetation, which basically means low-growing forbs, things like sunflower. Not only do quail eat the seed of the sunflower, but they eat the grasshopper that eats the sunflower plant. Croton, which is also called doveweed, that’s-
Hank Shaw:
Oh yeah.
Dwayne Elmore:
Another plant that insects really like. Ragweed, so quail eat the seed of ragweed, but there’s lots of insects that eat the plant, so a lot of these herbaceous, not-woody broadleaf plants that we collectively call them weeds, that’s a really important food resource, both directly and indirectly for quail.
Hank Shaw:
Would you include things like Lamb’s Quarters and pigweed in that?
Dwayne Elmore:
Absolutely. Those are two great plants.
Hank Shaw:
Side note, both of them are delicious. Both of them are effectively a wild spinach. I’ve served many a plate of those greens alongside fried or stewed quail.
Dwayne Elmore:
Have you tried dock as well?
Hank Shaw:
Dock is cool. Dock turns an Army green when you cook it, but it’s nice and sour, so it’s a good… I wouldn’t do just dock. It gets a little muddy, but dock in among the other wild greens is a really good one.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. I think dock has a little almost like mustard flavor, mustard greens.
Hank Shaw:
It’s a bit between that and sorrel. It’s very [crosstalk 01:09:20] much more like sorrel in my mind, where it’s genuine… well, it’s oxalic acid, so it’s a sour bit as opposed to the shark bit that you’d get in wild radish or wild mustard. How do you like to cook your quail?
Dwayne Elmore:
You know, I was talking to my wife before we got on this call about quail because she’s an excellent cook. She does some pretty elaborate recipes for certain types of wild game, but we were kind of commenting for whatever reason, and maybe it’s just where we grew up in the South, and she grew up in the Deep South. She grew up just outside of that plantation country we were talking about. For whatever reason, when it comes to quail, we keep it really simple.
The two ways we typically cook them are deep fried, and especially if you have biscuits and white gravy to go along with them, that’s a very traditional Southern way of eating quail. Also, just kind of skillet, frying them in butter and putting fresh ground black pepper on them afterward, so pretty simple. Really nothing fancy.
Hank Shaw:
Well, I must admit that I can’t do the white gravy, man. I just can’t do it.
Dwayne Elmore:
Oh, really?
Hank Shaw:
It makes me ill.
Dwayne Elmore:
Why is that?
Hank Shaw:
It’s just gross. It looks like congealed baby vomit.
Dwayne Elmore:
But it’s so good.
Hank Shaw:
You know, I can do red-eye gravy all day long.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, yeah. That’s good, too.
Hank Shaw:
I lose my Southerner card whenever [crosstalk 01:10:52] “I can’t do it, dude.” Gravy’s brown, period.
Dwayne Elmore:
Oh, I love white gravy.
Hank Shaw:
Well, yeah. Buttermilk fried quail, I think especially because if you have failed in plucking your bird, buttermilk fried quail may be your number one dish because it’s just as good with a skinned bird as it is with a… By the way, everyone out there, eat your legs.
Dwayne Elmore:
Absolutely.
Hank Shaw:
Quail legs are one of the great things in the world, and even though they tend to run around a lot, I’ve never had a quail leg that was so tough that it was unpleasant to eat. It’s nothing like a pheasant leg.
Dwayne Elmore:
No, they’re delicious. They’re better than the breast meat.
Hank Shaw:
I think so. I’ve got tons of quail recipes. Another good Southern one is quail and grits.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yep, absolutely.
Hank Shaw:
It’s a hard one to beat. It depends on whether you’re in the white grit or the yellow grit crowd. I tend to be in the white grit crowd, but again, it’s just pan cooked, usually bacon fat. You dust it with flour, whether it’s… The way I prep quail for cooking typically, it’s either I’m going to roast them whole or barbecue them whole. Whole barbecued quail are really excellent, too, but like a South Carolina barbecue sauce, that mustard style.
Dwayne Elmore:
Okay. Are you cooking those on an outdoor grill?
Hank Shaw:
Uh-huh.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah [crosstalk 01:12:19]-
Hank Shaw:
You can grill quail directly, and I do that a lot, too, or, you can barbecue quail, so you keep them way away from the heat and then let them come to temperature over the course of an hour. Then, what little connected tissue they have kind of breaks down and it’s a much more… It’s not crispy, but it’s a much more rich and pull-off-the-bone kind of experience.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. Now, you realize that you just went into the barbecue sauce realm and a lot of people are probably fidgeting right now because you mentioned mustard base instead of tomato base or a mayonnaise base, so-
Hank Shaw:
Oh, they can all kick rocks. Although I will tell you that all of the barbecue sauces are my friends, and you mentioned the mayonnaise base, that’s that Alabama white barbecue, which that’s the last traditional barbecue sauce that I encountered. I was appalled by it at first. “What is this? It looks like snot.” Finally, I had it with barbecued chicken and I liked it, and so I think I’ll make an exception for the white meat birds that, yes, you can use your Alabama white, and if you put Alabama white on like beef brisket, I’m going to [crosstalk 01:13:38] come to your house and kick you in the head.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. I don’t think that would work very well at all.
Hank Shaw:
Yeah. It’s cool, though. The reason why at the very beginning of this podcast that I asked about the evidence of Native Americans hunting quail is because in the research for my book Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail, I always do a lot of anthropological research for these books that I do. What is our human history with this whatever the animal is? In the case of quail, there’s a lot of evidence for Neolithic peoples in the Old World netting not only the Old World quail but Hungarian partridges and Chukars as well because all of them will group up like a covey, whereas like a pheasant won’t.
Dwayne Elmore:
Right.
Hank Shaw:
You find these recipes dating back hundreds of years for this sort of a bird in Greece and in Turkey and in Persia and in other places that predate shotguns. Some of these recipes are really, really amazing. My favorite, and I’ve got a recipe for it on Hunter Angler Gardner Cook, it’s basically a Greek soused quail. You grill the quail just until it’s barely done, and then you pour kind of a hot mixture of either vinegar or lemon juice and herbs and onions and things over it and souse it. It’ll keep for a couple two or three days like that.
Dwayne Elmore:
That sounds delicious.
Hank Shaw:
Great.
Dwayne Elmore:
The netting is really interesting. Obviously, that’s something that is not legal in the United States anymore for game birds, but it’s still done in a lot of parts of the world. You can go on YouTube and watch people in Pakistan dropping nets over partridge, you know?
Hank Shaw:
Well, if they do it over Chukars, I’m okay with it because they are hateful gray birds.
Dwayne Elmore:
They are very hateful. Yeah, I agree. I don’t think any Chukar hunter would disagree with that statement.
Hank Shaw:
If anybody out there is thinking, “What are we talking about?” I’m suspecting you’ve never hunted actual real Chukars. That’s [crosstalk 01:15:45]-
Dwayne Elmore:
Oh, no [crosstalk 01:15:45]-
Hank Shaw:
You go to a preserve and you hunt them in there, which is I find I don’t do that. If that’s all that you got, then that’s what you got, but-
Dwayne Elmore:
It’s not the same bird.
Hank Shaw:
No.
Dwayne Elmore:
It’s not.
Hank Shaw:
No. I guess the last thing I want to talk about is, because we spent a lot of time talking about habitat and I’ve got just buckets of prep and recipes and things on Hunter Angler Gardner Cook, but you just created an app, actually, that people can download on their cellphones, and then when they’re wandering around, and you’ll tell me more about this in a second, but when they’re wandering around, I guess, in quail country, that if they see a brood, a mom with a bunch of little chicks, you can bring up the app and go, “Hey, I just saw a bobwhite quail in Jones County, Missouri,” I don’t know if there’s a Jones County, Missouri, but you get my point, “And then there was 16 chicks behind it.” Then, click, and then it goes into your database. Do I have the general idea right?
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. We did this for a couple of reasons. We did it specifically for the Wildlife Department in Oklahoma to get more information on recruitment of different game birds. The other reason we did it is to give hunters and people that are interested in game birds a way to contribute, a way to be involved in conservation. You can download this app either off for an iOS device from the Apple Store or for Android and it’s free. If you just type in the search box “game bird brood app”, or “game bird brood observation,” or something like that and “Oklahoma State,” it should pop up.
Once you have it on the phone, you can click which species you saw. Since it’s Oklahoma-based, you’re going to see things like scale quail and prairie chickens on there, too. Then, you click the bird you saw and how many adults, how many young, and it automatically does the date and the time and a GPS location. As I said, we created it mostly for Oklahoma, but if people in other parts of the country want to use it, that’s great, and if we have enough people using it from other places like, I don’t know, Kentucky or someplace like that, then we’d be happy to share that code with your state wildlife agency and they could tailor it to be very specific to where you live.
Hank Shaw:
Yeah. I think it has the potential to be really super useful because bird counts of ground-nesting game birds is not that easy.
Dwayne Elmore:
No, and there’s lots of people out there, lots of eyes on the ground, hunters that are driving around. We thought, “They’re always asking how they can be involved. Why not give them an app?” It’s really resonated with folks. They enjoy it, and the thing that we did to make this useful is it’s quick. Okay, this doesn’t take five minutes of your time because, if you’re like me, if you see a group of quail run across the road, you’re busy, you don’t have five minutes to stop, but you could probably take 30 seconds, and that’s all it takes. It’s really quick. There’s just a few very short questions. You’ll be in and out within 30 seconds and you’re done.
Hank Shaw:
That’s pretty cool. Well, I will put a link to that in the show notes.
Dwayne Elmore:
Okay.
Hank Shaw:
And I really appreciate… This has been really, really good. You’re great on the air and you’re full of knowledge, and I might have to have you back for… Other than bobs, what would be your next most-studied bird?
Dwayne Elmore:
That’d be greater [crosstalk 01:19:33] greater… well, scaled quail or greater prairie chicken.
Hank Shaw:
Chickens [crosstalk 01:19:37] okay.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah, which is a great game bird. Very difficult to hunt, but that’s my favorite bird to hunt in North America, greater prairie chicken.
Hank Shaw:
Before I let you go, because we’re running out of time, I had noticed this weird phenomenon, and as a biologist, you may know the answer to it. I find that when you pluck a prairie chicken and you roast it whole, the meat is pink. When you breast out a prairie chicken, or even if you don’t breast it out or you just remove the breast from the carcass and cook it separately, it’s red like a duck. What’s going on?
Dwayne Elmore:
That would be a good question for a food scientist. Maybe we should pose that Alton Brown or somebody. I don’t know. Could it be [crosstalk 01:20:24] something with the fat, the lipids coming out of the skin that’s changing the protein structure of the breast meat?
Hank Shaw:
It could be that. It could be connection to the bone. I’ve noticed this three or four times now where as I’ll pick a prairie chicken, as I… I mean, dude, you don’t kill a lot of prairie chickens. You just [crosstalk 01:20:46]-
Dwayne Elmore:
No [crosstalk 01:20:46]-
Hank Shaw:
Plucking them, and they’re pretty easy to pluck if you do that three-day thing.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah.
Hank Shaw:
Then, the meat is pink. It looks like pork shoulder and if you take it off, it looks like duck.
Dwayne Elmore:
I’m going to have to do some research. I have no idea why that would be. That’s very interesting.
Hank Shaw:
It’s super weird. If you let me know or if you find anything out about it or if anybody out there has any ideas, let us know.
Dwayne Elmore:
Yeah. I’d love to know what’s going on.
Hank Shaw:
Well, thanks, Dwayne. I really appreciate again today having you on The Hunt Gather Talk Podcast, and we need to share the field at some point in the near future.
Dwayne Elmore:
Anytime. I’d love to, and thanks for having me on the show. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.
Hank Shaw:
Awesome. Talk to you soon.
Dwayne Elmore:
Bye.
Hank Shaw:
Thanks again for listening to The Hunt Gather Talk Podcast. I am your host, Hank Shaw, and I would like to thank Filson and Hunt To Eat for sponsoring this podcast one more time before we go. If you want to follow me on social media, I am on Facebook in The Hunt Gather Cook forum. It’s a closed group, so tell me that you found the group through The Hunt Gather Talk Podcast and I will let you in.
I am also very active on Instagram where I am also Hunt Gather Cook, and you can always find all of my recipes and all of the good things that I do, geez, for 13 years now, on huntgathercook.com. That website is Hunter Angler Gardner Cook and I would love to see you there. Thanks and I’ll talk to you soon.
