Article: A Bird in the Bush – Arkansas Life
- This topic has 3 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated Dec 14, 2013 at 10:45 pm by
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Hey guys –
As I get more interested in bird hunting, I’ve been jumping on the chance to write about it. Here’s a piece I did for my friend Katie Bridges over at Arkansas Life:
In 1983, the new “He-Man” cartoon series was the most important thing in my life. At my preschool that year, we learned to hide under our desks to ward off the thermonuclear holocaust. Ozzie Smith was the coolest man in baseball—he made the starting roster of the All-Star Game for the first time that summer, back-flipping onto the field and into history.
That was also the year the birds died. Read More…
Great article Zach.
I can actually remember hunting quail before the crash. I had always heard that fire ants were the quail’s demise. Newly hatched chicks, still moist from the environs inside the egg….would attract the ants like a magnet.
I can remember loading the dogs in the truck….and making the rounds from farm-to-farm in search of the coveys. We knew where they would be and would only take one or two birds from each covey…on each hunt.
Anyhow….great article.
Steve –
It is definitely mostly habitat loss. There are plenty of wild quail doing just fine right now in managed plantations in fire-ant country. They just use the old school brushy management practices instead of clean-fencerow row cropping like we have nowadays. I do think there’s some element of truth to the avian virus possibility, though. The Georgia quail numbers are a pretty smooth downward curve, but a lot of Arkansas hunters I’ve talked to specifically say 1981 or 1982 were the crash years, and those guys were very close to the land.
Zach
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