Perhaps we should point out that all predators are right wing, conservative, homophobic, baby killer animals. Perhaps that will make them such a hated group that a bounty on them will be funded by the government.
I concluded that without predator control, which was strictly illegal, my efforts to keep viable wild quail number were hopeless. Worse than that, I think that my efforts just concentrated prey numbers into a smaller area which made the predators job easier. While I can not prove with hard numbers the number of predators seen did go down after my efforts stopped. Nature returns a balance when man gets out of the way.
In the end it takes about thirty things to get birds to increase in numbers and one or two to wipe them out. Miss a single thing or fail to anticipate a single negative and the best laid plans are doomed. It is far more complex than cover, food plots and predator control.
The best quail numbers we every had on the farm was when we grew tomatoes for canning. Small fields with light weed cover on the edges, with grain strips for trucks to move down the field, with plenty of cover from the vines and open space for early predator detection gave quail super conditions for rearing young. Back then predators were victims when seen by an armed farmer. We would go from four to six coveys on the farm to more than a dozen. Big strong birds with all the strong flight abilities we love in wild birds. Canning is long gone and the crops do not favor quail because the farming has become so much a big business that it has to be run efficiently or you are done in a few bad years.
