Bobwhite 83 



one year out of five will show a crop failure, and that the degree, if not the 

 number, of these failures, can be reduced by winter feeding and other manage- 

 ment measures. 



QUAIL MANAGEMENT 



All of the preceding discussions of course bear on management, what it 

 should be, and why. There remains to be presented a description of present 

 practices, and a recapitulation of the principal findings of the survey with respect 

 to quail. 



Quail Hunting. Quail hunting with bird dogs is a comparatively recent 

 development in this region. The early settlers trapped quail for food, but did 

 not shoot them for either food or sport because of the abundance of larger game 

 and the lack of cash for ammunition. 



Widespread wing shooting of quail for sport, and also widespread trapping 

 and shooting for market, began after the Civil War. 



Market hunting of quail was by no means confined to what is now thought 

 of as good quail ground. Mershon (1923) records systematic market hunting 

 of quail in the Saginaw Valley of Michigan up to 1891. Market hunting in 

 Michigan became illegal in 1894. 



Bogardus was evidently marketing the quail which he killed in large num- 

 bers in the prairie counties in central Illinois in the 1870s. His shooting center 

 was in Logan County, which is not now regarded as good quail country. 



A curious fact encountered during the survey is that there was no quail 

 shooting for sport by local residents in the Ozarks until very recently. In Texas 

 County, for instance, I was told that no local residents shot quail for sport until 

 about 8 or 10 years ago, whereas at the present time a large proportion of the 

 business and professional men in the county seat own dogs and practice shooting, 

 and some of them shoot almost every day throughout the open season. The same 

 change is true in lesser degree of many Ozark farmers. 



Quail dogs are becoming increasingly scarce in the closed States. The 

 greatest remaining interest in quail shooting and quail dogs is in Indiana and 

 Missouri. When a State is closed, most sportsmen sell their dogs or ship them 

 South. It does not occur to them that the closed season is of their own making, 

 in the sense that the restoration of an abundant crop through management would 

 have dispensed with the necessity of closure. 



Map 8 shows the States and counties now closed yearlong to quail hunting. 



History of Seasons. Chart 4 shows at a glance the progressive shrinkage 

 in opportunities for quail hunting. In 1900 Wisconsin was the only closed 

 State. The prevalent open season in the other States was two months. About 

 1905 three States shrunk their seasons, possibly in part by reason of the hard 

 winters of 1903-4 and 1904-5, which Table 15 shows necessitated the replant- 

 ing of northern Indiana with Texas stock. In 1912, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri 



