NC State University News ServicesCampus Box 7405Raleigh, NC 27695-7504919/515-3470[email protected] www.ncsu.edu/news.html
Media Contacts:
Dr. Pete Bromley, 919/515-7587 or [email protected] Kevin Potter, 919/515-3470 or [email protected]
July 12, 2001
Zoologist: Farmers Can Help Reverse Declining Quail Population
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Farmers in the Southeast can play a critical role in halting the population decline of bobwhite quail, and they can do it without facing a significant decrease in the profitability of their farms, a researcher at North Carolina State University says.
Dr. Pete Bromley, an NC State professor of zoology who has studied quail populations on North Carolina and Virginia farms since 1990, has found that leaving unmowed field and stream borders doubles the number of bobwhite quail on a farm.
Bobwhite quail are popular game birds that require grassy or brushy habitat. Once common on Southeastern farms, bobwhite populations have declined in recent decades since the advent of modern agricultural practices that leave little farmland untilled. The number of bobwhite nationwide has declined about 2.5 percent per year since 1960.
Bromley says research by the NC State Farm Wildlife Recovery Team, which he helped establish, has shown that it's possible for farmers to make bobwhite habitat available in a way that's economical for farmers. "My challenge has been to allow wildlife some opportunity to come back onto the farm without upsetting the farm's budget," Bromley explained.
The easiest and most cost-effective step farmers can take, Bromley says, is simply to leave 15-foot unmowed grassy borders along their fields, ditches and roadsides. Farms of 300 to 500 acres with such borders on each field consistently supported up to twice as many quail as farms without the borders.
In addition to providing quail habitat, Bromley and his colleagues found that field borders improved water quality in nearby streams by filtering out sediment and excess nutrients that can harm aquatic life. Birds other than quail also benefitted from the borders, with higher songbird diversity and nesting density on plots with the borders.
Meanwhile, farmers can reap financial benefit from unmowed field borders. They are less expensive to maintain -- about $45 every three years per mile of border -- than keeping those borders mowed, at a cost of $50 per mile every year. Unmowed borders are even more economical than planting crops to the very edge of farmfields, because crop yields are typically not good in edge zones.
Many farmers can make up for lost crop income through hunting leases (avid quail hunters are willing to pay $64 for each contact with a quail covey) and "green" payments from government agencies, including the federal Conservation Reserve Program, to leave cropland fallow.
Additionally, no-till farming -- which leaves crop residue undisturbed from one year to the next -- can also benefit bobwhite quail. Foraging quail chicks gain more weight in no-till fields than in conventionally tilled fields because they are able to forage on the increased number of insects available in the crop residue. No-tilled fields also have the potential to increase quail habitat at the all-important development stage for chicks.
The research by the Farm Wildlife Recovery Team also found that -- counter to popular opinion -- the use of pesticides and the presence of predators such as racoons, foxes and opossums generally has little direct impact on the number of quail in a farmfield.
Bromley says that taking steps that improve quail numbers -- making more habitat available by maintaining field borders and by employing no-till farming -- generally makes economic sense.
"Our biggest challenge is to get people to think differently about how they manage their farms," Bromley said. "We want to see wildlife friendly farming take on real meaning with field border systems, with no-till agriculture, with better water quality. We're trying to work across all the disciplines we can think of to bring the information available from NC State and other researchers into actual practice."
The findings, Bromley said, would not have been possible without the help of farmers Glenn and Barbara Smith of Fountain, N.C. The couple -- who farm 1,700 acres in eastern North Carolina -- allowed the Farm Wildlife Recovery Team to set up four 300- to 500-acre research tracts on land they manage.
The couple this spring was awarded the 2001 Landowner's Award from the International Association of Fisheries and Wildlife Agencies and the American Farm Bureau, for their use of environmentally friendly farming techniques, such as no-till agriculture and 15-foot field borders, and for their support of the NC State farm wildlife research team.
"We wanted to engage the farm community, so that's why we did this on private land," Bromley said. "You couldn't pick a better person than Glenn Smith to work with. He's learning all the time, and he likes wildlife and wants to see wildlife benefit."
The Farm Wildlife Recovery Team's bobwhite quail research has been supported by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, Quail Unlimited and NC State University.
- potter -
Editor's note: A video about the Farm Wildlife Recovery Team's efforts, titled "Quail at the Edge: Can We Bring Them Back?" is available by contacting the NC State Department of Communication Services at (919) 513-3045.
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