When was the last time you heard a bobwhite call in the Ozarks?

I can remember one time in the past few years. It’s become incredibly rare, even though these birds were once a dominant species of the region.

So where’d they all go?

This week we brought on Dylan Jacobs, habitat restoration manager for Quail Forever in Missouri, and Clint Johnson, quail program coordinator for Arkansas Game and Fish to find out.

In today's edition:

What caused the decline of the bobwhite?
Why it’s all Bambi’s fault (well kind of)
7 headlines from the Ozarks this week

Let's get into it.

— Kyle

Why you don't see quail in the Ozarks anymore

Quail Forever

Explorer Henry Schoolcraft traveled the White River country in 1818 and didn't bother hunting bobwhite. His journal says there were just too many to make it sporting.

That's not the Ozarks most of us know. Quail have all but disappeared.

Here's what happened.

1. Prescribed burning was villainized

In the 1920s the Forest Service adopted an anti-fire ideology, believing that would protect timber resources and prevent economic loss.

They didn't understand (or chose to ignore) that Indigenous peoples and Ozarkers had been burning these landscapes for centuries as an integral part of stewarding the landscape.

How’d they change the narrative? They pulled on three powerful levers:

Religion: Sociologists studied the culture and suggested pulling religion as a lever. So the Forest Service funded churches along the national forest boundary, hired pastors, and ran anti-fire revivals with he message that burning the land was a sin against God and country.
Government: Then World War II came along, and actual government posters of that era showed Hitler and Japanese soldiers standing in front of burning forests, with the caption that letting your woods burn was helping the enemy win. That eventually led to the Smokey the Bear ad campaign.
Entertainment: Disney gave us Bambi… and we all remember that fire scene, right?

Clint Johnson described all of this as "straight-up propaganda. And very successful at that."

Three generations later, the cultural knowledge of fire as a land tool was gone.

2. Without fire, the open woods closed

The Ozarks forest most of us hunt today looks nothing like the one that existed 150 years ago.

Before burning was suppressed, these woods burned every three to five years, maintaining open savanna-woodland with a grassy understory and sunlight reaching the floor. When burning stopped, woody vegetation moved in fast and the canopy closed. We went deep on this with Roy Pilgrim in episodes. 210 and 211. This episode adds in the quail layer.

If you’ve ever found an old barbed wire fence or rock wall deep in the timber: that used to be someone's pasture before the trees came back.

3. The small farm disappeared

Quail live in the messy, in-between land that disappeared when the small farm did.

Clint's grandparents farmed 40 acres in Faulkner County: a little cotton, some corn, a mule, weedy fence rows, no herbicide, and no bush hog. When those families left for factory jobs during WWII, the land either grew up in cedar or got absorbed into 500-acre operations. After the war, factory machinery became cheap enough for any farmer, and the first thing most of them did was clean up the fence rows.

The in-between places went away, and the quail went with them.

4. Fescue covered the pastures

Non-native cool-season fescue spread across Missouri and Arkansas after the war.

Cool-season fescue became popular because it works well for cattle and stays green through the cool months when native grasses go dormant. But it grows into a dense turf mat with no bare ground underneath, and quail chicks need bare ground to move through and find food.

Native bunch-grasses leave corridors; fescue doesn't. No corridors, no bare ground, nowhere to go.

5. A quail chick is born with 50 yards of energy

When a quail chick hatches, it can travel roughly 50 yards before it needs to feed.

If it doesn't find an insect within that range, it starves. And even if it clears that hurdle, a heavy dew on a warm July morning in dense grass can kill it. The vegetation holds so much moisture that chicks get soaked and can't regulate their temperature.

The bird is built for open, patchy, insect-rich ground, not the closed, fescue-covered landscape that now covers most of their former range.

So that’s what happened to all the quail. Kind of a bobwhite bummer of a newsletter today. Sorry, folks.

BUT Part 2 is where it gets better.

We're back with Dylan and Clint next week to talk about what's actually being done, and whether any of it is moving the needle.

In the meantime, dive deeper on this topic and listen to the full conversation.

Here are the timestamps if you want to jump to specific parts of the episode.

0:00 – Why We're Talking About Quail in the Ozarks
3:00 – The Northern Bobwhite Conservation Stamp
6:30 – What the Ozarks Looked Like 200 Years Ago
11:00 – When Did the Decline Start? Tracing Quail Populations Back to 1900
13:00 – How the American Farm Changed Everything for Quail
16:00 – The Anti-Fire Propaganda Campaign
25:00 – What Quail Actually Need to Survive
38:00 – Where Quail Still Exist in Arkansas & Missouri Today
42:00 – S.C. Turnbo's Story

🎧 If you like platforms other than YouTube, find The Ozark Podcast on Apple, Spotify, and the rest.

Hither & Yonder

A few headlines from around the Ozarks that caught our eye this week. If you need talking points for the front porch this weekend, here's some ammo.

🎤 Actor Kevin Costner showed up in Hot Springs last week to back a bipartisan bill that would renew the Great American Outdoors Act (the 2020 law that funds national park maintenance) before it expires and leaves campgrounds and federal lands without upkeep money.
📺 AGFC Commission Meetings are happening this week, Jun 17-18. Find recordings or join today’s broadcast on the AGFC YouTube Channel.
🎣 18 double-digit largemouth went back to their home lakes through AGFC's Legacy Lunker Program this month, and nearly every angler who caught them got to wade in and release the fish back to the exact spot it was taken.
🗺️ The Forest Service just replaced 30 separate apps with one. The new, free National Forests and Grasslands app has offline maps, campsite & trail closures, and interactive MVUMs built in.
🔪 Missouri's "Butcher Bird", or loggerhead shrike, is a songbird that hunts mice, lizards, and other birds, then stores them by impaling the carcasses on thorns and barbed wire fences.
🎯 MDC may require a small game permit to use unstaffed shooting ranges, tying range access to hunter education. Proposal heads to public comment this July.
🪕 This KSMU Notable MO-ments piece is worth five minutes to understand why the Ozarks holds onto what it holds onto, from one-room school houses to a rural music show that's been going since the 1970s