Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas with support from the Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program

When it comes to quail, TPW biologist, Robert Perez, says they’ve had it rough. Habitat fragmentation and drought beat them up in Texas. Working with adjacent landowners to manage their properties for quail is helping to address fragmentation – but what about drought?

26— Where it’s dry, what you can do is be proactive. And so you have proactive strategies for drought, which is leaving residual cover; leaving standing grasses; leaving standing vegetation and not mowing it down; shredding it, or putting cattle on it or other livestock that will remove that vegetation. So you have to have something standing there for them, which is difficult to do in a drought. But there are areas that you can protect. And those quail will kind of hole up in those refugia until things turn around.

Thanks to a new grant from the Wildlife Restoration program, Robert Perez says the agency can now monitor the recovery efforts to help these native game birds.

20–By monitoring I mean you need to go in and count how many animals there are on the front end, and then you have your treatment or your improvements. You then continue counting and seeing if there is actual response by that species. So, we just got a grant from the Pittman Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act Fund – a federal grant – to go in and start measuring the impacts of our works at three different locations in the state over the next four years.

And we’ll follow along and report on their progress.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program supports our series and funds diverse conservation programs throughout Texas.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2012 at 12:00 am and is filed under Conservation, SFWR, Wildlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.