Deer vs Quail: Managing Your Property for Both Species

Quality quail habitat can also double as a big buck breeding ground, but you won't make it happen by accident. Dr. Bronson Strickland, Dr. Mark McConnell, and Bonner Powell break down where deer and bobwhite management overlap, where it doesn't, and why thermal cover might be the most overlooked factor on your property.

Transcript

Intro

Moriah Boggess 0:01

Welcome to Wildlife Investments, where we discuss wildlife research, habitat, hunting, and land management with our panel of leading resource managers. Wildlife Investments. Resource management by scientists.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 0:22

One of the things that we often neglect, and I'm really excited to have this conversation today. We talk a lot about the influence of thermal cover, and that could be on a geographic scale, but even at a property scale, is that in the South, we don't think about the impact of heat. How can that affect deer? How could it affect movement patterns, this, that, and the other? It's also critically important for bobwites. And that's one of the things we're going to get into today is talking about thermal cover. How can we manage for it? Could that be the single biggest limiting factor on your property or not? So good conversation today where we're going to talk about the trade-offs between managing for deer and deer habitat and bob whites. Today we are joined by Dr. Mark McConnell. Mark, how are you doing, buddy? Just fine. Happy New Year. Looking forward to the insults today. They're coming. Oh, I know. Yeah. And and Bonner Powell, glad to have you with us again today. Thanks, man.

Bonner Powell 1:24

Yep. Happy to be here

Does managing for quail hurt deer?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:24

here. What I would like for us to do today is uh kind of review what are we giving up? So let's so let's think about if we have a property that, hey, my number one objective is I want to I want a thriving deer population, productive habitat, so forth, um, and I want to produce quality bucks. Excuse me, quality bucks. I want to produce trophy bucks. Are we going to give up anything by also managing for bobwites? Because there's a lot of scenarios I can see to where they complement each other, but we could go to an extent to where we start moving towards we want to maximize bobwhite populations, we're gonna give something up on the deer side. So I I guess I'll kick things off with uh Mark and Bonner chime in when appropriate. How do you feel about that, Mark? Have you, I think in all of your experience, you've been on a whole bunch of properties where the number one objective is managing for bobwhite populations and the rate at which these places you work with, the rate at which they're seeing birds and kicking up cubbies, you know, it's it's the the top of the top. You also see on those properties a lot of good deer. So is it just happening in the margins? Is it just happening via neglect is the wrong word, but it's just an accidental consequence of we're focusing on quail and those deer, we don't care about them. And as a result, there's a few of them are getting really old and really big. What what's kind of your synthesis on that?

Dr. Mark McConnell 3:04

Yeah, well it's a great question. Of course, like every good answer, it depends on the property and the land cover that we're dealing with, right? So if it's a property that's got a lot more bottom land, for example, yeah, I don't have the the flexibility with the quail that I might and and more of the uplands. But yes, I would say to answer your first question, if you if you push, if you think of it as a spectrum, right? And we're pushing full deer management, there's some things where quail exists, there's some things you're gonna give up on quail, full quail management, there's some things you're gonna give up on deer. What I've experienced across the states I've worked in, both professionally and privately, is the properties, like you say, that are they they're they're talking to me. I'm on the property to to maximize quail numbers. Rarely are they not avid deer hunters and really like shooting big bucks, right? So what we try to do is we focus on managing obviously the the habitat components that we can to maximize quail, and that's where most of our overlap exists, right? Then when it comes to how we're managing food plots, how we're managing certain, you know, in a pine system, I'd say that's where we have the most overlap in terms of, hey, we're gonna thin the pines down, we're gonna get sunlight on the ground, we're gonna put fire on the landscape, we're gonna use herbicide when appropriate. And in those cases, like at properties Bronson, you and I have both have been engaged in, a lot of quail, decent deer. Where it does get more complicated is when it's outside of a traditional pine system, when you've got mixed pine hardwoods or, like I said, mostly hardwoods, then the situation gets a little more extreme. If somebody comes to me and they've got, like I've got a uh a property in uh Tennessee that I was burning at last week, the the woods of the property are not the dominant land feature. It's a lot of old field kind of stuff, right? The only thing I really tell the landowner in the woods, other than thin when he can and let the fire creep in there, is get some more sunlight on the ground. But the the deer groceries that we're creating through intentional bobwhite management are extensive. So what I tell landowners is, and I think all y'all's research over the years would confirm, you're getting big deer. Obviously, you've got to have the groceries on the ground, but the harvest approach is undeniably important to get those deer big. How you're managing your population, how you're letting butt bucks get to a certain age class is where you're getting that into that big margin. Like I said, property I was on the other day, the guy shot a 180 and has a couple of 160s and 170s on the wall. We're we're managing that place 100% for for to maximize quail populations. So there's a I think there's more opportunity than there is sacrifice, but there are places where you're gonna sacrifice for sure. Just, you know, Betty cover, for example, like a lot of the stuff that we may do for deer. I'll just go, hey guys, if that's what that's gonna be, that's not a place I'm focusing on quail because that's an area you really want to be nasty and not fun, right? And that's fine, right? There's room uh on a lot of properties we've got room to do both. So I'd say more times than not, there's a little sack, uh, it's it's it's mutually beneficial where the sacrifice comes in. It it is important and it's pretty property specific in terms of what they want.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 6:36

So educate me on this. Um obviously you have that property you were just referring to, you have got it tuned up. It sounds like you are maximizing for the most part everything for for Bob Whites. Talk about the landscape context of where they're at, and if you if you're at liberty to say the size of the property, the acreage.

Dr. Mark McConnell 6:57

It's about a 900-acre property, which is a you know, good sized property, a good size for, you know, kind of writing your own fate, I would say, in terms of what you want out of it. Um and the landscape around it, they they I mean they grow big deer up there, uh, you know, it's North Tennessee almost to Kentucky. They're they're growing big deer. Uh so he's he's benefiting from the landscape for sure. And if you zoom out to the property, it's a lot of ag in the landscape, a lot of rolling hills, a lot of really quality timber. So the landscape is uh he kind of this is not to take away from the landowner's uh uh uh engagement, but he showed up on second base in terms of, you know, deer management, right? He's he's in a good landscape. There's probably not a lot of people. Um well, I I think one of the things he does really well is dough management. I mean, they're they're they're pulling, they're they're they're going at stacking up dough, which gives him a lot of advantage. So yes, he started off on second base. Maybe he was in a little scram trying to get to third, and then when we started really getting in and started really pouring fire to the landscape, we took out some ag, kept some ag. He had a lot of erosion issues on the slopes, so we stopped farming those. So now I think he's I think he's farming maybe 60-ish acres of of soybeans and corn just to just just just for deer, never harvesting it, just leaving it there. So he that got him to third base, I'm sure. He's got good food plots, he really is proactive on that. And uh and he's really good about I've never seen so many cameras on a property. Uh I don't know what the camera ratio is per acre, but he's got fifty for 900 acres. Uh so that seems like a lot of saturated pretty well. Yeah. So and but again, he I think what what it comes down to is quail has no interest in hunting them. I'm trying to get him there, but uh he just wants to see them and have them. And so we're there's no bird dog, there's nothing. It's just he wants to drive around, see and hear a quail, and he wants to shoot big deer, and he's he's killing it. I mean, it's it's one of the most enjoyable properties I've ever worked with because the landowner's engaged. They he he he likes to try new things, and uh again, it's it's been tremendous and mostly the betra we've done some mulching and some other things, but it's mostly fire. Uh we're just it the the the food he's got in his in his ag fields, every ag field is surrounded by old field. So the the the and and and so it's ag field, old field, woods. Oh man. It's just perfect. It's perfect. And his stand placement is is really impressive. He he's and of course the cameras really helped. Yeah.

Bonner Powell 9:44

Yeah.

The doe harvest problem

Dr. Mark McConnell 9:44

Uh so yeah, it's a cool property to work on. And I would love him to get a bird dog and and try to enjoy maybe some some take and some recreational harvest of those birds, but he's not interested in that. Or right now he's not, and that's fine. If he's happy, I'm happy. And when we were out there the other day burning, I mean, we were flushing quail at every end of the property. And uh all we've really done is take some responsible approaches to agricultural management, not farming slopes, you know, only farming the really good ground. So we took some of that out. We've added fire to the landscape. And um uh, I mean, they were we flushed a covey as we were coming up to the lodge. I mean, they're just they're just everywhere. And uh one of the cool things he's he's doing is he sends me every time he sees a quail in a spot we've started working on that was not being managed before, because that's a really good sign people forget about. It's not just how many quail you hear and see. When you start seeing birds in new areas, right, you're showing the expansion. The birds are spreading across the landscape and you're making more, Bronson, I'm I know you love this term, usable space for for the bird. And that's really what you're trying to do. What we're trying to do is we're trying to make the landowner encounter the bird he wants to encounter at every inch of the property when it's appropriate.

Bonner Powell 11:01

Yeah. Uh Mark, what about what about like the average landowner? Like I I know when I I worked with a lot of landowners that that were, you know, on fire for coil, haha, you know, that's a good pun there.

Dr. Mark McConnell 11:15

Uh but you get the rim shot in there.

Bonner Powell 11:18

But, you know, not as big on the the dough harvest. And and that really is what I saw most of the time. It wasn't so much a habitat or a cover limitation or food limitation at all. It was a density limitation. Just a lot of those of those places that are managed for quail, they're they don't have as much of a priority on deer and they hold too many deer most times. At least that's what I see.

Dr. Mark McConnell 11:44

100%. Yeah. I've been fortunate that, you know, I guess of the properties I worked in, more times than not, in the deep south, they just kind of want to see quail, right? So they're willing to do a little bit, but you're right, 100%. More times than not, when they're all in on quail, if they're not an average just pine goat enthusiast, yeah, they they they back off on their dough harvest, uh, or they're what they think this is the magnitude of what a responsible dough harvest should be on certain acreage. I think landowners who like, hey, I killed 10 doughs out here. Well, you needed to kill 40, you know, and that you you you go from recreational dough harvest, and Bronson, correct me if I'm wrong, but at some point, dough harvest is work, right? Right to get you to where you need to be and then to maintain that dough harvest, right? So yeah, I you're right, Bonner. I a lot of them you don't see, I I hate to admit this and I'm afraid to even say it, but I kind of want them to be a deer hunter if it's a quail property. Because if they're a deer hunter and they're serious about it, yeah, they're gonna be more in tune to managing that deer density, uh, which again, uh I I think we've all seen this. You go out to a property and the deer density is so high and every ragweed stem is nipped. Well, that ragweed's not producing seed that year if it keeps getting nipped. Well, I need that seed for quail in the fall, not to mention I need that cover in the summer for chicks. So managing deer density is going to help me get you more quail if that's what you want. And the same goes for turkeys, right? That I've seen where every ragweed stem is completely nipped off. And again, good forage, but I need I need a little of those to make to make a seed uh for the fall for sure.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 13:35

Uh Mark, just so you know, and I'm not gonna dwell on this, I just want you to know it was noted the the term pine goat. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. That's old one for Bruce. Yeah, uh I'm gonna think up of an equivalent term for Bob Whites and just start throwing it in there and just see how you react.

Dr. Mark McConnell 13:56

It's not necessarily a negative term. It's just uh I mean I mean it negatively, but not everybody does.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 14:01

Yeah, I think you generally mean it negatively. So, Bonner, what uh what I take away from this, I think there's a lot of lessons here. Uh that there's a landscape context. In other words, precisely what what Mark is saying, we can't use a cookie cutter on the landscape and say we're gonna get the same response because all around that property is contributing to what what Mark is seeing uh on the deer side, and probably the bobwhite as well to some extent. So what Mark has done, and I'm breaking this down very simply, but uh I think what Mark has done with all the fire and the managed openings, he has really ramped up food, naturally occurring food for deer. Because the size of the property, and I'm guessing Mark, you you obviously have a landowner. I don't know how many guns hunt that property every year, maybe just one or a couple of no, he's he's got a buddy that brings some high school kids, and that really helps, yeah. Yeah. But but it sounds like there's enough cover, and the landscape around it is providing enough cover to where it is a sufficient deer population, the production of bucks based on what the what they want to hunt and harvest. If we had this exact same scenario in that landscape to where, hey, everything's good, but we just would like to see more deer, possibly produce some more, then Bonner and I would recommend, you know, the the trade-off there of, hey, we're gonna have to add maybe a little more cover. We're gonna have to hold, try to hold more deer on the property. And that would kind of be the balance point for me. Do y'all see that any differently?

Dr. Mark McConnell 15:42

I don't really uh I'll go first. The um I can see uh I can envision situations where if you a lot of times somebody buys a new property and it's it's it's it's gonna take some work to get it to what they want, whether it's quail, turkeys, deer, whatever, where if you're like, hey, if it's all say old field and you've got nothing to really have deer feel safe and concealed and whatever, then yeah, there's some sections there where I might even say, hey, that needs to succeed to a little bit of way outside quail cover, just so you have a place where these deer can actually move through this landscape and feel a little more secure, not to mention the huntability of it. Can you imagine a thousand acres of just wide open old field and the challenge of getting deer to move through that landscape in a way that gets them in boat range, much less rifle range? So yeah, there's some ch there's some situations where if they are also interested in deer, we've got to make sure I've got to make sure I'm not negatively impacting their huntability or the ability of deer to really, really want to be on that place the time of year they want they want them there. That's a really good point.

Bonner Powell 16:51

Yeah, and and I I've seen a lot of stuff, Bronson and Mark. Y'all tell me if y'all have seen the same thing, but especially during the growing season, during the summertime, you'll look at something and you're like, oh, that'll be that'll be really good cover come fall time for a deer, you know, and it really when you come back in the wintertime, it's not. I mean, it's just, you know, I mean, what we're talking about as far as deer cover goes, is like really stuff that you really can't even walk through yourself. Uh now, on the flip side of that coin, and I think this is where a lot of stuff uh with quail management and deer management doesn't overlap, is on the flip side of that coin, the stuff that looked fairly thick during the summertime, maybe in the woods, like under some upland oaks or something, during the wintertime, that's necessary for those quail to have some kind of winter cover just from avian predators. You know, they got to have something. So uh, you know, if it ends up not being deer cover, cool, whatever. But on the flip side of that coin, a lot of times it is quail cover.

Dr. Mark McConnell 17:56

Yeah, that's a really good point, Bonner. And that's why like multiple touch points on our property, seeing a property in the growing season, seeing in the dormant season, and you can't really evaluate what's limiting. So anytime on a property, especially if it's a quail property, the first thing I'm looking for is what is the most after I've understood the landowner's objective and how serious they are about it or what their potential to reach it is, is I'm what is the most limiting factor to quail on this? And more times than not, it's overwinter cover. It's it's shrubby cover. If it's not shrubby cover, it's brood cover. Uh and those two things are both manageable, but they have different time spans on how you get to them, right? So if they don't have any shrubby cover, that takes a little bit longer to get it to where it is than if they just don't have brood cover. We can make brood cover in a in a growing season, pretty much. We can establish good shrub cover then uh that quickly. So it does it does take into effect, like, hey, these types seeing properties both times of year to really understand what you don't have and what you need more of is the is which is why I think in our, you know, in this business model, it's it's multiple touch points on our property. One site visit just isn't going to be sufficient, regardless of the time of year, to fully understand the property.

Bonner Powell 19:14

Let me ask you this, Mark, and it's just something I've thought about before, and you know, I'd like to get your perspective on it. But a lot of times we as kind of deer managers, we look at landscapes like as far as ag uh, you know, for for deer anyway. We're we're looking for ag to be close to the property. Uh, just if we're looking for a big deer landscape, that that's kind of what we're looking for, among other things. But as far as quail go, I've been to properties where uh, you know, you can do just very little work and uh, you know, an almost astounding number of quail will show up for the little bit of work that you did. And I've been to other places where you're like, There should be quail here, and they never they never they hardly ever see 'em. They You know, they might hear a whistle, you know, every now and then, uh, but by and large, you know, what are the landscape features y'all are looking for uh kind of for a quail property?

Dr. Mark McConnell 20:09

Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I've had that too, where the landowner is doing everything they can do, but the landscape around them just doesn't work. So uh the ag thing, quail do not need agriculture. And I'm saying need with a very hard end. They don't need agriculture, right? They can benefit from agriculture at the right spatial scale, but they don't need it, right? They uh we used to think they needed it because they were so tied to the agricultural landscape, but the most they don't need it, right? So if I don't look for ag in a landscape, what I look for is managed, uh disturbed, herbaceous vegetation, uh shrub cover, and more importantly, bare ground, like having bare ground under uh under good cover, which is a very hard thing to quantify in terms of how quail move around a landscape. I I look for shrub cover, I look for that. I honestly we've overplayed grass big time. Uh I love native warm season grasses, but we've overplayed them for at least my whole career. So I'm not even looking for that anymore. There's probably enough grass on the landscape in most properties if they're being disturbed that we've got enough for quail. So I'm looking for brood cover, shrub cover, because those are the things that are typically most limited. And then when I'm walking through that vegetation, cover's one thing, food's another, right? So I want plants that provide cover at least during a critical time of the year, if not two critical times of the year when possible. And I want something that's providing food all year. So ragweed, go back to ragweed, uh, really good for overhead cover, you know, umbrella cover, bare ground underneath when it's disturbed, and it attracts insects, but it also produces a fall seed. So we've got we've got food direct with cover at during the breeding season, and then we've got food twice a year. Partridge pea, same thing. Really good at attracting insects, pretty good cover during the growing season, can get out of control. We've got several examples of partridge pea over my head that is a problem. But it also producing a legume, a pie that's food in the in the fall. So plants that are doing both of those is really what I'm looking for. And then overall, Bonner, I'm looking for plant diversity. I I say this all the time, even hunting. I'm I was trying to explain to somebody what a good landscape looks like. When you look across an old field, just or any early successional plant community, I'm looking for differences in complexity of cover and I'm looking for differences in color, right? I want to see yellow, green, orange, a little bit of red every now and then. I want to see a multiple colors because that tells me the plant diversity is most likely where I can tweak it if I need to to get it. If I see one color or one kind of constant, let's say old broom sedge field, that's not good quail cover, right? There's there's not enough in there to keep them around, and you're not having enough food. So I'm looking for cover and complexity in the structure. And when I find those things, we typically have quail, and then when we can get to those things, we typically have more.

Bonner Powell 23:13

Yeah. So what I'm I'm hearing there is like if I'm looking for something on the landscape that's going to provide both brooding, probably shrubby cover, what what I'm probably looking for in in our area of the world in the southeast at least is probably uh, and correct me if I'm wrong, a fairly active forestry program within, you know, several square miles. Or, you know, I mean, how much does scale, you know, matter for that kind of stuff?

Dr. Mark McConnell 23:42

We definitely need bourbon to finish that conversation. The uh here's what we know the least about with Quail is the scale at which we have to be making an impact. Now, there has been some tremendous research out of James Martin's lab at UGA that is looking at what we call the scale of effect, right? How certain land cover types and certain management practices at what scale they have the most impact. And the last paper he published showed fire, the scale of fire is different than the scale of other things, right? So that is the that is kind of the next frontier in quail research is how big of an area do we have to be affecting to keep quail around, much less increase density. So we don't know the answer uh fully yet, but I can tell you the more the merrier. So if you any property I work with, one of the questions I ask is, what's your relationship with your neighbors? And if they have a good relationship, that's a great thing because oftentimes the neighbor's better at con the landowner's better at convincing his neighbor to do something, or at least to be open to doing it, like burning or like like, hey man, like look, you've got this stand next to mine. We're both hunting turkeys here and or deer. If you burn and I burn and we coordinate, we just we just maybe you know theoretically could double the acreage on the landscape that got a fire and we're pulling animals in, right? So getting those landowners to talk to their neighbors and kind of radiate out of their property is very beneficial to the landowner itself.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 25:14

So, Mark, if uh if overwinter cover can be, and is often, if I understood you correctly, a limiting factor, can you plant it?

Dr. Mark McConnell 25:25

Yeah, absolutely. We have spent way too much time, but not too much, it's all been good work, but we spent a lot of time in the last few years planting uh in in Mississippi, planting a lot of plum thickets, chickasaw plum, trying to establish some good thicket cover like that. Um a lot of times when I'm evaluating a property, if I see a blackberry thicket that's, you know, you know, when they're small, the fire rolls right through them. When they get pretty big, there's kind of an interior that the fire's not getting into. And I love that. And I've even had landowners who really love tractor time. I say, hey man, any blackberry thicket you see, just disc a little line around it for me. Let's keep fire out of it just for a little bit. Let's let it, let's let it, let's just let it let this fire not get it. Because eventually when it gets big enough, the fire is not gonna, it's not gonna get through it. So promoting natural uh shrub cover, right? Uh dogwood thickets, if you've got plums on your property, that's great. Honestly, even like it's not good winter cover, but like wing sumac, right? Sumac's a pretty good summer cover because it's really shady and you know, it provides it, it's not really useful because the leaves are off in the winter, it's not terribly useful. But just promoting those and making it to where the arrangement of them, you know, quail really can't fly that far, right? So if I can get them to keep escape cover, shrubby cover every 150 meters or so, quail can usually, if they get flushed, get to it, and then making sure it's of size that they can hide and a predator can't get into it. But yeah, so we can plant it and we can promote it, uh, but we can also just enhance what the what the soil already gave us and maximize it. And I don't think we see enough of that in the quail world. Just, hey, these blackberry landowners hate blackberry. I I cannot tell you how many calls I get, hey, what do I spray to get rid of this blackberry? And I'm like, what are you managing for? He's like, well, quail. I was like, well, please don't spray the blackberry. Now, there are properties. My brother-in-law's got one in Arkansas where the blackberry is like 10 feet tall. That's probably a little too much. That can be a problem. Yeah. So I, you know, he's gone in and mowed some of that and we've tried to save some of it. But yeah, I mean, that's that's that's a different story, but that's that's not the norm.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 27:32

Yeah. So if you had a scenario to where somebody bought a property or they just changed their mind and and they have the resources and time, and I want to get on this ASAP, you know, I want there to be changes this year, and they endeavor to establish a grid or areas where they're gonna plant, let's say Chickasaw Plum. Um, number one, what would be the scale in terms of is that quarter acre patches, tenth of an acre patches, acre? That question number one. Then question number two, you get, let's say you get good establishment survival, you have a viable thicket, you get two years down the road, how do you manage that? Do you run a fire through it? Talk about that, please.

Dr. Mark McConnell 28:14

Yeah, so the first question was oh, the how do you do it at the the the size? We have no clue. I'll say bigger is better than smaller, uh, but we really don't know. No one's really never tested. If you look at natural, like existing um plump thickets on the landscape, it's all over the map, right? I've seen some that are an acre in size and some that are little patches. So we typically I try to do a minimum of 30 by 30 or 50 by 50. That's what we go off of. Now, granted, there's not a lot of hard science on that. We just found that's it's manageable, it's doable, pretty much creates a thicket over a few years that they can use. But we if it should it be 100 meters, hell, I don't know. That's what we've done is a minimum 30 by 30, and but go for about 50 by 50, and every five feet we're planting a uh in a in a grid.

Bonner Powell 29:09

I can't that's 30 yards by 30 yards, not 30 feet by 30 feet. Yeah, ideally, yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Mark McConnell 29:16

Yeah, just to claim just to clear. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Good point. And so, but Bronson, I couldn't tell you that that's the right way to do it. That's just kind of what the profession seems to have accepted without a whole lot of uh science to back it up, because that's a hard thing to study, right? You uh but uh uh several people have been talking about it. Uh what we need to figure that out. And then on the management side, in my experience with plums, um we we like to spray out the the grass or whatever's there before we plant, and then it kind of and then we put a ring around it, try to keep the fire out for a little bit. But no, it depends on how well they grow. I've had incredibly good success with survival of Chickasaw plums, but I know I've been lucky in that. I I know a lot of places do not. Uh and I think probably I don't know what the reason for that is, but I try to keep fire out of them for a good while, and then I'm waiting for the canopy to close, and that's gonna control the vegetation under it. I try to keep fire out of them until they're really, really robust. And again, much like a uh blackberry thicket, once they're really robust and established, that fire's not it's not hurting those plums. Uh now I've never ran a growing season fire through them, but a dormant season fire is sure not gonna hurt.

Bonner Powell 30:25

Yeah, I've uh I've done a little bit of work with planting some of the plums, Bronson and Mark, and and uh to Mark's, you know, what he said, I really like the the 50 yards by 50 yards or 50 meters by 50 meters, uh, because a lot of times if you do burn through them, you know, earlier than you probably should have, you probably should have waited. A lot of times they'll split and make two. Really? And yeah, a lot of I've seen that happen several times, and a lot of times that ends up being really cool. Uh and I'll tell you another thing that I've done, Mark, that me and Rick Hamrick did a little bit of. Uh, but a lot of plums, you know, once they get up, they'll canopy, you know, fire doesn't go through them during the dormant season. They'll get really, really tall. We did actually, you know, cut some off about you know, waist to belly button high and just kind of let them sprout back out. And they turned back into really, really good cover. I was really impressed.

The 89°F thermal stress threshold

Dr. Mark McConnell 31:17

Yeah, I was just gonna mention, so I have not done that with plums yet because all the ones I've planted in the last few years are just now getting to where we're probably about to have to make that decision. Another way it to just get just get some some structure in on a quail property. Uh, I've got a property where they had planted years ago before I was there, a bunch of sawtooth oaks, which of course I'm not a fan of. I don't know where the deer people stand on it, but I I I I don't like it. And so we went in and they were huge. And we went in and we hinge-cut them all and laid them down. And then two years later, vines and blackberries got all in them, and essentially we had a functional shrub cover without all we did was lay down a tree. So we've also, like I'm I there's probably no plant I hate more than eastern red cedar. So we've come in and we've pulled, you know, cut down cedars and just we don't stack them, just lay them next to each other at about a 30 meter by 30 meter, 50 meter by, and just walk away. Now you'll let that first fire grow through. I don't protect them at all. And again, a couple years, you've essentially got a bit of a thicket there that quail and we see quail in them. Now, I cannot say they are increasing quail populations, but I can say the quail absolutely use them. And I think the reason we see so much immediate use is most properties are don't have enough shrub cover and they're desperate for cover. And again, a lot of the shrub cover talk in the quail literature all focused on winter. Winter, winter, winter, winter cover. And in the upper part of the range where snow cover is an issue, sure. What we don't focus enough down here on shrub cover with quail is it's hotter than hell during the summer. A quail enters thermal stress at about 89 degrees Fahrenheit. They either have to start gular fluttering, which is just panting, or they've got to make a new decision in movement to get cooler. So you think about how much of the Mississippi or just anywhere in the country now, how much of the summer is it above 89? I think it's 89.6, something, whatever. How much is above 90 degrees? A lot. So during that part of the day, the the usable space of that landscape is not the same as it is that morning. It is changing because of the thermal environment. So having good shrub cover where these birds can get out of trouble, get cool, and not have to pant and not have to make suboptimal decisions is important. One of the first telemetry studies when I got here, they were, they had put out some birds, and every single location was in the very few existing shrub thickets that we had. And I saw that, I was like, hey, I already knew we needed more cover, but that's what I showed to the landowner. Hey, your birds are telling you they're desperate. And my guess is they were getting hammered by predators because there was so little shrub cover. So we have spent a lot of time and effort putting more shrub cover on that property so those birds have better options, right? And they but that thermal environment, the thermal ecology of quail, we just don't know enough about it in the south. There's there's been no research.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 34:23

Bonner, I I never thought I would hear this. It it's saturated in the deer habitat management talk and literature, hinge cutting for bobwites. Uh Mark, you have cornered the market on that. Mark will come to your property and hinge cut for bob whites. Um so that I think that's really, really important. And uh I won't go down the the long uh story or history of being in South Texas, and I know Fred Guthrie was starting out optimal temperature stuff way back when. And man, it's so interesting in what Dwayne did at Oklahoma State and stuff you're doing now and others. Um you've got an optimal size, it sounds like. So we think about old field and and gosh, you ought to just maximize the landscape with old field. But if I'm understanding you correctly, it's yes, we need to have a lot of acreage of old field, but it needs to be compartmentalized with a lot of shrub cover. So we don't need to have half the property is shrub cover cover, half the property is old field. It needs to be intermixed with a lot of cover in between.

Dr. Mark McConnell 35:33

Yeah, think of a that's where that cover, that color difference shows up. Uh a quail property should look to the untrained eye, and that's not an insult to people, it's just hard to know what good quail because there's so little of it around. A good quail property to the untrained eye should be ugly as sin. They should go, uh, this is gross. It's this and then that. It's always changing. Yes, you want everything intermixed as possible, and you want good um, you know, annual form communities next to a little bit of perennial grass mixed with forms next to really good shrub cover all throughout the property. You want those birds, every step a quail takes. Well, first of all, everything in the woods, just about, including pine goats, will eat a quail if they get a chance at certain times. I'll stop saying. Uh, you know, they've documented deer eating eggs at a quail nest before. Now that doesn't happen a lot, but it is, it is, it is, every everything will eat quail at some point. So every step a quail takes, they are vulnerable, right? So if you can give a quail the ability to not have to go half a mile to find good nesting cover or go half a mile to find good shrub cover, if it's all just intermixed, not only are you minimizing the expenditure time they're doing it and the vulnerability, you're also saturating the landscape so a lot of mammalian predators can't key in on one particular structure type, right? So when you've got one, let's say you had one big 50 by 50 meter really high quality plum thicket in the middle of an old field, and that's the only one you've got. I guarantee you every predator is gonna figure out that's where quail are in the middle of the day in the summer, because where else are they gonna go? They're gonna, they're gonna die of exposure when it's 104 degrees on all in the grass. So the having those intermittent, it's not just about the quail, it's about managing the predator population too. You can manage the predators by giving them a harder time to be efficient. And what what's a no predators keying in on just quail, right? That that's the great thing, but everything will eat them. So that's right. So you've got a lot of cotton rats that you're getting from good old field management and good plum management and good structure and good disturbance, then you know, every bobcat that comes around, it's like, oh, wait, yeah, I heard a quail, but there's 40 cotton rats in this acre. Those are a lot more easy to capture, and those quail have the ability to use multiple cover types to escape predation.

Do quail and turkey nesting overlap?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 37:59

So that's one thing, Mark, that that I would see that could, not not necessarily it is, but could be somewhat confounding is from a deer management and deer huntability aspect, I don't want cover dispersed all over the landscape. I want dedicated patches of cover because I want to set up in between cover and food. That's where the huntability comes in. That's the whole huntability part. Okay, so now the the the one critter we've left out of all this, and so I'm wondering now, we've talked about some of these cover patches for quail. It may not be perfect, but it could be suitable for deer and the arrangement of it. Talk about do these cover patches for quail also serve as nesting for turkey? Great question.

"Quail habitat looks like chaos"

Dr. Mark McConnell 38:46

Yeah, so oh man, turkey nesting. Wow. So there's what quail nest in, and it's a lot easier to predict. And then there's what turkeys will do. And turkeys are just drive you to alcoholism because they're just so frustrating in what they'll do. All over the whole world. So they'll nest every now and then in some stuff that you might consider more quail-friendly nesting, but then they'll nest in some really heinous stuff that you couldn't pay me to walk through. Uh and and because they've just got that, they've got more plasticity in their nesting behavior. So, yes, you can that there's a lot of overlap, especially in the brooding, right? And what what what what what's we're gonna attract insects and provide overhead cover. But absolutely, there are some when you're really managing for really robust turkey nesting cover, you're gonna start getting to a point where quail probably aren't gonna nest in it on the on the right side of that spectrum of a bell shaped curve of distribution of cover types they're gonna use. Quail definitely aren't gonna be on that right end, right? They're not. And that's okay, right? So if a landowner really likes to turkey hunt, deer hunt, and quail hunt, what I typically do, like you're saying, especially on the huntability side, is We're going to give up a little on the quail because I fully recognize, as you and I have talked about for a decade, deer are going to be typically the most the what they spend most of their time pursuing, and therefore a lot of what they are most passionate about, and that's perfectly fine. I will give up a little bit of quail cover if it keeps the landowner happy and keeps the landowner managing and disturbing and lighting fires. But yeah, on the turkey side, especially the right end of that nesting distribution, yeah, that's stuff you're not going to find quail nesting in. But in the winter, you might find quail using it a little bit, but you're not going to see the same thing, and that's okay, right? We talk a lot about the overlap between turkeys and quail, and there's plenty of overlap. There's plenty to separate them to, and that's something we don't focus enough on, especially when you get out of a pine system or an old field system and you get more to say bottom land uh type situations. That's where they just it's it's a whole different ballgame there. But good great point.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 40:57

Uh given that that's a whole different ball game, uh, I think that's probably a good teaser. We need to relegate that to let's focus a whole episode on that. That would be fun, yeah. You really piqued my interest on me learning learning more about that. Well, guys, I think we need to wrap up. Bonner, any uh closing thoughts? No, not really.

Bonner Powell 41:18

I mean, I just I've I've heard once that uh and Mark, you could you could talk to this or laugh at it or whatever, but quail management is is looks like chaos, but it is painstakingly planned. Uh so that right there is like you're saying, it just looks like hell, but but you wanted it to look like planned for it to look like that.

Dr. Mark McConnell 41:41

Yeah, you've got to warn landowners. Like I often bring it pictures on my phone, like this, this is what we're going for. Because a lot of them, all the magazines, I know we got to go bronson, but like all the magazines, they show these open pine systems with nothing but grass. And a lot of those are preserves, and that you know, that's a whole nother thing. But the you go to the Red Hills and you go to tall timbers and you go to all those quail plantations, they are not just all grass. You will see so many different color spectrums. That is dirty stuff, right? And there's briars everywhere, right? And that's where the quail are, right? And the dirty, yeah, I like that. It looks like chaos, but it's very painstakingly planned. Yeah. Good point.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 42:21

Yeah. Okay, gentlemen, thank you so much. Good good episode. Uh, and this is a common question, so uh hopefully we've answered some questions for people interested in this topic. Thanks so much.

Moriah Boggess 42:34

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