Relationship to Other Game Birds 
Competition between different species, wherever their habitats 
overlap, is a law of life. Often, in birds, it manifests itself in their 
special requirements for territory, in their search for nesting sites and 
for food and water. Competition may be severe in one case and have but 
little effect in another, 
Program biologists are alert to the possibilities of competition be- 
tween foreign game species recommended. for trial in the United States 
and native game birds. But, unless one actually makes a successful liber- 
ation of the new species in a fresh environment and analyzes the results, 
the only other source of reference is the study of the species considered 
for release in its native habitat, 
With the black francolin, it has been possible to utilize both 
approaches, As a result of information already gathered, this species 
was recommended for limited trial in 1956 but it was 1960 before many 
birds were released. Since then, in several States and notably in 
Louisiana, the black francolin has demonstrated an ability to survive and 
reproduce in substantial numbers, mostly in croplands, grasslands and 
adjacent brush plots. In some areas the territory occupied overlaps that 
of the native bobwhite, thus providing alert State biologists with an 
opportunity to observe and evaluate any signs of competition. 
The evidence thus gathered to date, indicates that the two species 
get along well together (46). The birds tend to separate into vegeta- 
tionally different parts of the same area with francolins in soybeans, 
cotton, rice, and in tall, grassy and overgrown cover. The quail usually 
prefer overgrown fields and open woodlots. Thus, the two species are 
sometimes found in substantial numbers on the same 100 acre plot, but 
largely in different cover. Where their paths cross they appear to 
ignore each other or in winter to join forces in a loose covey of quail 
and francolins. On the Oak Ridge area in Louisiana, a male bobwhite and 
a francolin called, often simultaneously, for over a month from fenceposts 
12 feet apart with no apparent antipathy. When flushed the bobwhite would 
fly to a brushy pasture, the francolin into a soybean field. Even though 
francolins are now said to be as abundant as quail on several trial re- 
lease areas, no diminution in bobwhite numbers has been reported. 
This apparently innocuous relationship was foreshadowed by our 
observations of francolins in their native habitats. Both the black and 
the gray francolins are conmonly flushed from the same, often small, 
patch of sugarcane, wheat, millet, or mustard in northern India where 
ground cover is fairly open. In West Pakistan it was often impossible 
to predict which of the two species would be put up by beaters from the 
part cultivated, part overgrown flood plain of the Indus River. In Iraq 
along the little Zeb River, we flushed black francolins and seesee par- 
tridges from the same patches of weeds and brush, lining the banks. 
39 
