Range-wide, bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) have declined an estimated 80 percent over the past 40 years, said Don McKenzie, director of the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative, a University of Tennessee-based consortium of 25 state wildlife agencies, conservation groups and research institutions launched in 2007 to form a unified strategy for saving bobwhites. "It's hard to overstate how serious the problem is. It's becoming really severe," McKenzie said. "All 25 bobwhite states have experienced short, medium and long-term declines." Moving in lockstep with the decline is a steep falloff in Texas quail hunting, a cultural touchstone for generations of hunters and a once-powerful economic generator. In 1960, 321,000 Texas quail hunters bagged 98 million birds. In 2010, there were fewer than 50,000 hunters and the harvest was around a half million quail. Hunters fear their children will never know what they're missing.
"A whole generation is being lost. They've heard stories of the good old days, but we haven't had a good year in the last five," said Joe Crafton of Dallas, one of the founders of Park Cities Quail, which has raised millions of dollars to fund quail research since 2006. "People are very concerned and wonder if they will ever come back."
The Northern Bobwhite, Virginia Quail or (in its home range) Bobwhite Quail (Colinus virginianus) is a ground-dwelling bird native to the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The Northern Bobwhite's diet consists of plants and small bugs, like snails, grasshoppers, and potato beetles. Plant sources include grass seeds, wild berries, partridge peas, and cultivated grains. The Northern Bobwhite forages on the ground, in open areas with some spots of taller vegetation. Northern bobwhites can be found year-round in agricultural fields, grassland, open woodland areas, roadsides and wood edges. Their range covers the southeastern quadrant of the United States from the Great Lakes and southern Minnesota east to Pennsylvania and southern Massachusetts, and extending west to southern Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and all but westernmost Texas. These birds are absent from the southern tip of Florida and the highest elevations of the Appalachian Mountains, but are found in eastern Mexico and in Cuba. Isolated populations of these game birds have been introduced in Oregon and Washington. The Bobwhite has also been introduced to New Zealand.
Sources: Houston Chronicle, 23 September 2012
http://www.chron.com/news/article/Bobwhite-quail-a-vanishing-breed-in-T…
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Bobwhite
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