By: Jim Wooley, Quail Forever Senior Field Biologist (Emeritus)
My personal piece of humble pie is the One-Box/One-Quail hunt, a legendary fit of missing where, no lie, I fired 23 shells before bagging my first Iowa bobwhite. As I stood, finally, appreciating that bob, my hunting partner asked, “what’s he been eatin’?”
I gestured to picked corn beside the hedgerow. “Seriously,” he said, “lets open his crop.” Surprisingly, that quail was stuffed with weed seeds and grasshoppers. In a sea of waste corn, this quail had chosen differently because of food size, composition, or physiological need.
Quail food habits aren’t complicated. Bobwhites are granivores, consumers of weed seeds and grain (85 percent of adult diets). They trend omnivorous, seeking insect protein and fats for reproduction, feather molt, and rebuilding depleted bodies. In reproductive females, invertebrates comprise over 20 percent of the spring/summer diet. Freshly hatched chicks run close to 100 percent on bugs, fueling rapid growth and plumage development. As they near adult size, their diet shifts.
Bobwhites occupy a range of highly variable habitats – fire-managed low-density pines, oak savannahs, mixed livestock/grain country, dry brushlands, and much more. Their foods are likewise diverse. Studies over the past century tally 1,000+ plant items consumed by bobwhites, plus insects. Diets revolve around food available within very small home ranges (20-40 acres).
Quail forage early morning and late afternoon. In mixed farming country, grains (corn, sorghums, soybeans, wheat, sunflowers) are diet mainstays fall through spring, accompanied by weed seed. Among broadleaved forbs, ragweed is perhaps the premier wild quail food. Small-seeded and retained on stems, it offers nutrition (18 percent protein/20 percent fat) superior even to corn (12 percent protein/6 percent fat) and can be abundant (~200 lbs/acre).
The catalog of wild quail foods includes legumes (partridge pea, lespedezas, clovers, tick-trefoil), grasses (foxtail, switchgrass), forbs (sunflowers, buttonweed, beggarticks, pigweed), oak and pine mast. Raspberries, blackberries, wild grape, dogwoods, and plum are taken. Grasshoppers headline an insect menu featuring leafhoppers, ants, ground and leaf beetles, spiders, and snails. Most foods, not all, are highly nutritious.
Analysis of Kansas quail foods illustrates the importance of key plants in supplying fuel for birds in winter. They include western and giant ragweed (meeting 89-99 percent of energy needs), corn (89 percent), soybean/sorghum/sunflowers (84-87 percent), and dogwood berries (82 percent). Conversely, lower energy foods (rose hips, poison ivy, sumac) even if abundant, cannot maintain body condition.
Homebodies anyway, quail hunker down tight in severe weather. During prolonged cold, without energy-dense foods nearby, birds are quickly stressed. An 18-year study in Kansas tracked winter losses of bobwhites located near food plots (-34 percent) versus coveys at further distance (-50 percent). Better survival near plots correlated with improved body condition from higher energy food. Birds harvested near plots carried 50 percent more body fat, allowing them to survive twice as long without food.
Making quality foods available, in quantity, isn’t complicated either – with insightful management. Discrete quail habitats play shifting roles seasonally, and there are food security opportunities woven into most. Consider shrubby corridors – year-around travel lanes, winter protection, plus berry production. Corn/sorghum food plots clearly improve survival, contributing to recruitment. Rotated idle the second summer, plots do even more. They sprout bug-producing broadleaves that moonlight as nesting and brood-rearing cover, noshing spots for recovering adults, and create nutritious wild seed for fall and winter. And so it goes with other habitats.
And yes, decades later, my shooting prowess continues to entertain.
This story originally appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Quail Forever Journal. If you liked it, and would like to read more,
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