Passport to Texas

This is Passport to Texas

In the rolling plains and south Texas brush land, years of drought has taken its toll on bobwhite quail populations. East of Interstate 35, the problem is fragmentation.

09 —And so it’s more an issue of: how much habitat is left. And the question is: if you build habitat will the birds respond? And I think that they can and they do.

Robert Perez is the upland game bird program leader at Texas Parks and Wildlife.

19—Right now we’re working in three different focus areas of the state, where we are concentrating resources, manpower, habitat funding, working with partners in select counties to do that very thing: to impact enough acreage to reverse the trend of fragmentation and to demonstrate through surveys – through counting birds – a positive response. Because we know it’s possible.

But how much habitat is enough in our modern, highly developed times?

23—In the old textbooks, they talk about a quail living its whole life on 40 acres if it has everything that it needs. While that very well may be the case, you can’t have a viable population on 40 acres in the middle of a shopping mall. So you’ve got to have some area. And there have been researchers that have taken estimates at what that may be. And it ranges anywhere from 800 to 10-thousand acres depending on the quality of the habitat.

How landowners work together to create quail habitat: that’s tomorrow.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program supports our series and receives funding from your purchase of fishing and hunting equipment and motor boat fuel.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.