Houston asked participants, lifting up a suitcase that had dollar bills fluttering along its four sides. That's what it's like to be a bobwhite quail. Snakes, hawks, rats and other mammals, and disease all take their toll on the birds, whose only defense often is to run into underbrush. Increasingly that underbrush is absent. Timber, controlled grasslands and production fields have left us with very little of the brushlands and hedge rows that serve as the quail's habitat.
Management strategies can help reverse the declining numbers.
Burger advised land owners who want to increase quail populations to cultivate early successional plant communities consisting of native grasses, such as sedgegrass, rather than exotic species like fescue, which is prevalent in pastures across Tennessee, and Japanese grass, which is displacing native plants in pasture edges and brushland. Jotting notes in a yellow notepad, Ross Hamilton, a city alderman in Bartlett, listened attentively to Burger's talk. Hamilton said he finds the annual field days a rich source of information for presentations he makes on his own to Eagle Boy Scouts, area churches and other organizations. Ames Plantation is so close to Bartlett and Memphis, and yet so few people know of these events, and they're wonderful. I can talk about bobwhite quail, field trials and Ames, and everyone is interested.