I’ve no qualms stating my preference for hunting quail above all other animals, furred, finned or feathered. You may not be able to hunt them in Montana, at least not officially, but that may only be a matter of time.
Valley quail have already infiltrated the Bitterroot and I suspect they’ll soon spread throughout the Clark Fork River Valley.
Valley quail is the state bird of California, and when found within the Golden State’s borders, is known as California quail. Valleys are a little like rainbow trout in that they seem readily adaptable to various habitats. Some of the quails — there are six in the United States — are too specialized for particular habitat types to share this faculty for conquest.
For folks in the West, valleys and their close cousins, Gambel’s quail, are what most of us envision when we think of the species, especially non-hunters. We think of quail and our mind forms an image of a bird with a top knot.
As you move east, however, the common identity of quail takes on the form of the bobwhite. Ask someone from the Carolinas to describe quail and they’ll speak of the white-faced males perched atop a fence post, calling bob-bob-WHITE in the spring.
But while valley quail expand the species’ range, bobwhite quail struggle. There remain strongholds in west Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, but in the Deep South wild bobwhite quail are all but a memory.
Steven Rinella’s MeatEater podcast recently took on the issue of declining bobwhites, with much of the conversation focused on the threat to the bird behind its Maginot Line. Ron Kendall, a professor specializing in wildlife toxicology at Texas Tech, was the guest and the topic, not surprisingly, was eye worms.
Kendall, by the way, developed QuailGuard, a medicated feed that protects quail from eye worms, recently approved for use by the FDA.
Eye worms are parasites with a complex, dual-host life cycle. When quail eat grasshoppers or crickets infected with the parasite’s larvae, those larvae migrate from the bird’s crop to its eyes in as little as 10 minutes. There they feed on the soft tissues of the eye socket, maturing and producing the next generation of parasites.
And of course, by blinding and weakening the quail, eye worms render the birds highly susceptible to predators.
The depth of the problem wasn’t recognized until after the disastrous 2010 quail population collapse in Texas, Kendall explained. It was supposed to be one of the boom years, with plenty of rain and mild (by Texas standards) weather. All summer reports flooded in of an epic bobwhite hatch. In a state where quail hunting is akin to religion, the winter bird season promised to be one of the best, ever.
But by October, the quail had disappeared.
Since then, QuailGuard was developed using medicines already known to work on eye worms, and another parasite, cecal worms, because domestic poultry are susceptible too. But Randall and allies in the quail conservation community had to navigate additional challenges to get FDA approval to use the medicated feed on wild birds.
Once testing started the drug seemed to halt eye-worm infections and quail numbers thrived in treatment areas.
You might think that quail numbers in Texas are a concern only for hunters with the resources and means to travel about the southwest during its pleasant winter months, but that would be a mistake. Eye worms infect a number of game and songbirds. Included on the list are sharptail grouse and gray partridge in Montana, where hunters found infected birds this season.
Kendall called bobwhite quail canaries of the prairie in his interview with Rinella. The decline of quail across much of its former range tells us a lot about what a mess we’ve made of the bird’s habitat.
We can only hope the lesson learned in Texas won’t have to be repeated in Montana.