It’s been only under a year now since the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency completed their Northern Bobwhite Quail Restoration plan, and it is only in the past few weeks that they are finally moving forward with putting it into action. For a number of reasons around habitat loss and farmland problems in Tennessee the bobwhite quail population has been declining significantly over the years. This makes them difficult to maintain as the state game bird, and they were not quite at levels of endangerment, but they were closing on the requirement of stopping all hunting seasons on them.
This restoration plan creates anchor areas which will serve as permanent reservations for the birds and allow biologists to focus on one of these four areas to help assist in keeping the quail populations high. From there, all quail outside of these areas will be open to freely hunt. This assures there is always a quail population, and it even makes the hunting of them more interesting at the same time.
The reason this plan took so long to set in motion is all because the plan was first decided then the locations needed to be informed and they had to come up with a strategy for helping the birds. Overall, the process has been long, but the ground work is set in place and the quail should start to see improvements in their numbers very soon!
Unfortunately, this also means that the hunting season was restricted when it comes to quail in Tennessee while the population is beefed up. The result should end up leading to more quail and less restrictions on hunting in the future though!
Leave a Reply