By
Carolee Anita Boyles
When my granddaddy was raising cattle and cotton in the piney woods of Madison County ninety years ago, he burned the woods on a regular basis. All his neighbors did the same thing. They knew that putting a fire through the piney woods didn’t hurt the trees; it killed all the brushy hardwoods, and made the native grasses and other plants put out new growth that the cattle loved.
In those days a lot of Florida was open range, and cattle farmers burned large tracts of land each year to provide good forage for their animals. This closely mimicked the historical fire regime of the Southeast; for centuries, lightning-struck fires burned millions of acres of southern piney woods each year, keeping the mature pinelands open. Early 20th-Century cattle farmers accomplished the same thing as nature, providing a landscape that benefited quail and other native wildlife.
Then along came new forestry practices. The US Forest Service, in its understandable and legitimate zeal to eliminate destructive wildfires from the woods, went too far and eliminated all controlled burning as well. Forest fires in and of themselves are not bad things; our southern piney woods evolved through fire. Fire only gets to be a problem because people have either 1) built something in the way, or 2) suppressed fire for so long that a heavy fuel load in the woods causes a huge wildfire which is destructive instead of the natural order of things. The removal of fire from the woods drastically changed the piney woods habitat, making it unsuitable for quail and many other pineland species of both plants and animals.
At the same time, patterns of land use in the state were changing. Around the turn of the last century, except for some of the big plantations in north Florida, much of the landscape was broken up into small farms. Farmers raised a variety of subsistence crops, including vegetables, corn and cotton. Those are all good crops for quail, where the birds can catch a lot of insects to eat.
The only laborsaving device on the farm of the 1900s was a mule, which kept the fields small. And since cleaning the fencerows was too much work, fields were bordered by tangles of briars and other weeds. Overall, the landscape was one of small fields and woodlots, with strips of rough, weedy habitat types between the fields.
Shortly after the turn of the century, as new farm equipment became available, the way farmers used the land changed. Large fields were easier to plow than small ones, so intervening fencerows disappeared. Remaining fencerows were cleaned and reduced to wood and wire, leaving nowhere for birds to escape predators when they were feeding in the fields. As a result, productive quail habitat virtually disappeared.
The effect on farmland quail was dramatic. Over the next couple of decades, quail populations plummeted, and the common man’s game 
bird began disappearing from areas where it had previously been abundant.
Other agricultural innovations further depressed quail numbers. Increasing use of pesticides by the calendar instead of when needed reduced insects of all kinds—which young quail rely on heavily for food—dramatically.
Forestry practices changed as well. Landowners cut large tracts of old-growth longleaf pines, the quintessential pine of the southern woods. They either did not replant, or replanted with closely spaced monocultures of loblolly and slash pine, putting the land into short-term pulpwood rotation. Increasing conversion of agricultural and forest land further and permanently reduced the habitat available for quail.
Large landowners in the northern part of the state quickly became concerned. Many of them were northerners who had purchased old cotton plantations, and they counted quail hunting as one of the great assets of the plantations; the disappearance of the birds alarmed them. They engaged the services of biologist Herbert Stoddard to find out what was happening to the state’s quail. His work showed clearly that when the piney woods are allowed to grow up in with a brushy understory, quail populations suffer. Stoddard’s work eventually led to the establishment of Tall Timbers Research Station north of Tallahassee.
Stoddard’s work, which flew in the face of established US Forest Service policy, took a while to catch on. But when it did, farmers started burning the woods again. And in places where there were still a few quail present, the population started to expand. At the same time, other wildlife benefited. Deer like new growth after a fire just as much as cattle do; in fact, they frequently re-enter a burned area the same day as the burn, while stumps and logs are still smoldering. Turkeys, too, gravitate toward the open areas left after a burn, where poults feed on seeds and insects in the new growth.
Other factors also are positively affecting quail in Florida. Modern agricultural techniques, including Integrated Pest Management of row crops, controlled burning in pine plantations, and allowing fence rows to grow up again, are creating better habitat for quail on the state’s farms. In addition, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWCC) has an initiative to help landowners manage their property for quail, which also helps other wildlife at the same time.
This doesn’t mean that everything’s rosy for the state’s quail population. In areas where quail have been completely eliminated—and there are a lot of those areas—no amount of burning or other habitat management is going to bring the birds back without an influx of wild birds (as opposed to the pen-reared birds that are used in put-and-take hunting). And with our increasingly fragmented landscape in the state, areas large enough for good quail populations are much less abundant than they were a century ago.
Fortunately, the FWCC also is undertaking management practices on public land—including burning—that benefit quail and many other species of wildlife. And as private land managers understand the important role of fire in the Florida landscape, more agricultural and forestry areas are being managed in ways that improve wildlife habitat on the land.
