By: Harold Elie
I grew up in southern Illinois and now hang my hat in Tennessee. Both states are historically meccas for quail hunting, and both now only hold faint memories for an older generation. I was raised by quail hunters and dogmen who trained wild quail dogs.
We hunted every Sunday afternoon after family lunch. It was tradition, and the birds were plentiful. I was reared on the tail end of this, long past the good old days of my great-grandfather’s quail hunting experience and his father’s, who hunted prairie chickens alongside quail with the double-eared muzzle-loading shotgun to be passed down to me.
It was still a part of my family’s heritage to hunt quail into the late ’90s, even when most had sold their dogs or not bought another after the last died due to the declining bird numbers. My cousin, who was holding onto the dream by field trialing, finally decided to be done for good, and I forgot about quail hunting for years. After moving to Tennessee in my early 20s, I focused on deer and turkey, but I had the itch for quail. Why was this once-abundant quail state so barren of its own state game bird?
Over time, I found myself in the depths of many conversations with biologists and state agencies, educating myself on the quail’s history, trajectory, and downfall. I soon became frustrated and bitter. The words of Henry David Thoreau rang true “…I wish to know an entire heaven and entire earth.”
I was upset with state agencies for letting their habitats be mismanaged, hunters for over-harvesting while the resource was struggling, and the lack of give-a-shit from anyone. This was a bird that brought my family together and was once a household name from the East Coast to Middle America.
In these regions, you would now struggle to find someone who knows what a bobwhite quail is, even in their most historically dense home ranges. I often hear, “Is that like a pheasant?” when talking about quail or even grouse, for that matter. The general public, for better or worse, has now claimed the ring-necked pheasant as America’s game bird—the Dallas Cowboys of upland bird hunting, if you will.
Living in the South, it’s heartbreaking to meet young sportsmen who are passionate about the outdoors but have never been quail hunting, much less know how to go about it even if they wanted to. It’s also hard to explain or get one excited about the notion of picking on a species of bird that continues to struggle or about hunting hard for low reward. A five-hour hunt in the ’50s may have yielded several coveys; on that same piece of land today, you may be hard-pressed to find one.
The best and closest thing I can compare the modern southern wild public land quail hunter to is the likes of a backcountry Appalachian trout fisherman: only a small but mighty few with tough bark on them, like a black locust, who are willing to go to unreasonable lengths will even bother.
They’re the kind who will spend hundreds on fuel, non-resident licenses, and excessive mileage on their truck, only to find one covey of birds and maybe shoot one or two. Then, with complete satisfaction from dog work and expectations met, they leave content and drive hundreds of miles back with a shit-eating grin at merely knowing the location of such an animal. It’s the feeling of being the only one who knows the location of a treasure in an uncharted cave.
Wishing more would appreciate these birds, I want to tell everyone, but it would send the orange army after them, like a pack of coyotes on an injured fawn. I stay quiet, go back to them if their covey has a good number, but only return for dog work if their numbers are low. Of course, this isn’t my rule but one of many of the unwritten quail hunting laws: Only pick on coveys of good number, and leave the singles and small coveys be. If you can only pick out the male or cock birds and only shoot one or two birds on a rise, you’ll start to look more like a modern southern quail hunter.
Though our parents and grandparents had their cake and ate their quail too, there’s still a small and complex group of southern wild quail hunters, continuing the art of bird dogs and bird hunting through a peculiar lens. Unlike previous generations with high expectations of covey numbers and bag limits, it’s now more about the pursuit and preservation of the art and culture.
Further south, longleaf pine plantations are carefully managed for quail. While bird numbers are usually good there, these are essentially shooting preserves for the very wealthy, and far removed from the marginalized public land covers of southern Appalachia.
I know the quail numbers will never be what they once were, but I’ll continue to hunt them all around the Southeast and in their home ranges—not to fill my freezer or feed my ego, but to experience this bird that I grew up with in different places and habitats.
Hunting the bobwhite in the South has taken me to some beautiful places that I otherwise would have never gone to and has shown me beauty in some places that the rest of America has forgotten, much like the bobwhite itself.
