doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Land Management Practices..... Then and Now

Fractured habitat and failure of the 'Spring shuffle' (where the Winter coveys made up of brother and sister birds split up far enough to prevent inbreeding) is a big part of the bobwhite problem. Build up 500 contiguous acres of perfect bird habitat and watch the quail disappear in two Springs. If you build it they still won't come...Geo

Good post Adam (courtesy of OWD's blog). Up here in the NE, the deer have come back in big numbers and browse the woods heavily and leave little forage or habitat for other wildlife. I have 3,000 acres of open space across the street - the only wildlife I come across are occasional garden variety songbirds and deer and coyote sign.

What many suburbanites see as peaceful woods are in fact peaceful wildlife deserts. But good luck trying to suggest controlled clearing to introduce successional forests and edge habitat!

And for hunters up here, there is no silver lining - unless you want to sign up for goose control on the local golf courses, or bow hunt 100lb deer - not hunting by any real measure. But then again, a state law prohibits discharging a firearm within 500' of a residence without the owner's permission - which now means that 60% of the land in MA is effectively off limits to hunting anyhow.

Out here, you can't shoot within 1/4 mile of any occupied structure, even in the middle of nowhere. Occupied structures include maintenance sheds, trailers, barns, the portable office at a cattle feed lot, etc. Gotta carry a rangefinder just to go bird hunting.

I spent more than two decades learning that almost all the experts had about ten percent of the knowledge they thought they had. Various attempts to establish viable wild quail population each failed in succession. One variable that I never had a chance of controlling was predators due to strict regulations. But even if I had removed all of them, which is impossible, the end result would have still been failure.

Still I enjoyed most of the experience and did manage to keep quail going in hunt-able numbers for two generations of dogs. When my last dog died my interest died with her. Am sure many know what I mean as the pleasure of a dog working was something that I enjoyed almost as much as anything other than seeing those marshmallow size baby quail for the first time. Perhaps I should have been interested in raising collie size deer or Johnson grass as there seems to be an abundance of both in too many areas these days. Quail are just about a memory these days.

Brilliant post and comments.

Solid woodland is not the wildlife heaven usually assumed. Neither are the huge monocultures of modern farming.

In Europe there is the problem of small farmers leaving the land and the forest taking over. One species that benefits is wild boar, which in turn press whatever ground nesting birds remain in the woods. No wonder there are wild boar inside urban areas now. And it is not only gamebirdfs that suffer, biodiversity as a whole is diminishing, but it is more convenient to blame it all on "global warming" rather than apathy and inaction.

The British Game Conservancy, now called the Wildlife Trust, has done excellent work for nearly a century on this subject.

Here in Pennsylvania, we have young forest that has become mature, and mature forest that gets clear cut or selective cut. We have clean farming farmland and Amish farms and abandoned farms that are mostly brush and early succession forest.

In other words, we still have plenty of good habitat, although that good habitat changes locations as the fields and forests either mature or are again cut or plowed. Still, we have seen a dramatic decline in Ruffed Grouse, and Ringneck Pheasants have been scarce to non-existant for over 30 years. Our brilliant Penna. Game Commission has never corrected the error they made by allowing the shooting of Pheasant hens. Their biologists refuse to see the connection between formerly very healthy populations, and the rapid decline after allowing the killing of the hens.

Grouse has always been cyclical, but since the introduction of the eastern coyote, the cycle has ratcheted downwards dramatically. I don't think having a Red-tailed Hawk on every other telephone wire is helping small game populations either. Wild Turkeys are also not nearly as plentiful as they were a decade or so ago. Again, I place most of the blame on coyotes... and the Game Commission that brought them here.

You are right about the red-tails, but as plentiful as they are they are not much of a threat to bobwhite. They are so slow. They catch one occasionally, but it is the smaller hawks that do the real damage to quail. Cooper's and Sharp-shinned are quail killing machines. The numbers of them have literally exploded here in the last 15 years. They aren't the reason quail numbers crashed. That happened before their numbers increased so dramatically, but they certainly put pressure on the few coveys that are left. I have seen them catching quail in front of me. They are the next thing to a laser guided missile.

SRH

Predation has long been a biological taboo, the meme being that the "last wolf will not eat the last deer" etc. This is a legacy left by Lorenz, starting first with aggression, and then spreading to other concepts. Over the years biologists have realised that predation does play a role, often a major role, in the wildlife mix. This is especially true with predators that have alternative food sources, ie corvids, gulls and rats that also feed on garbage and have plenty of energy to indulge in what is apparently hobby predation. Such predators are not limited by their prey.

And predators can and do cause the extinction of their prey, and prey rebounds when predation is removed, as proven by management projects as in Rat Island and Campbell Island.

It took biologists a generation to overcome Lorenz's influence on aggression. Wonder how long it will take to correct the predator myth.

Very interesting post and comments.

With kind regards,
Jani

I guess it is a point of view. Are cultivated fields with rough edges are the best management practice, or were the virgin New England forests a system that worked? Are birds the point of it all? Private land or public?

Regardless, I am struck by how things change over time. I work in the oil industry and about 30 years ago I was doing a project in SE Ohio. The topography is mildly rugged and the surface is part of the National Forest. In the summer you couldn't see 50-75 yards for the trees and undergrowth. On one of my scouts through the Ohio Historical Society photo archive I came across a 1902 dated photo that was taken in the area of the aforementioned project. In fact, I was familiar enough with the area that I could go and stand on the hillside the photographer used to take the picture. The photo showed the river valley below and the ridge on the far side. There was not a tree to be seen. Fast forward to the 1980s and there were grouse in numbers; I haven't been back since but I presume they have been mostly replaced by turkeys. Which era was good management?

I understand allowing the land go back to forest. They won't be like virgin woods in our lifetime, but to understand the impetus, you owe it to yourself to find one of the rare patches of truly virgin forest still remaining in the eastern US. A stand of hardwoods with four and five-foot diameter trunks is breath-taking.