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Double Up On New Mexico Quail
GETTING STARTED
Teddy Roosevelt would be impressed. No, it's not that the sprawling and slightly undulating flat grasslands of southeastern New Mexico are encompassed in Roosevelt County. Though, I do have the very real sense he was consummately an honorable man, and would be humbled by the respect paid. This lover of the outdoor life would be impressed by the big sky here, the expansive open space only sliced now and again by a ribbon of a blacktop road rarely traveled, or a slim long line of a barb-wire fence separating pasture. Moreover, he'd be taken aback by the sheer number of quail - swarms of them, really - bobwhite and scaled quail that paradoxically survive a harsh and unforgiving land of little rain and lots of wind.
It's a place of legendary dust storms that push and pull dunes that offer about the only relief in the topography. What ever it is, if it's not nailed down, it will blow away. Cattle ranchers and peanut farmers can eke out a living. Many tried over the years, spurred on when the Congress passed the various acts in the 1800s to divest public lands and encourage private land ownership. But the east coast government didn't fully appreciate that laws like the Homestead Act worked for the Midwest farmstead - but not here. How could they know that you can't grow timber in a hard scrabble desert as prescribed in the Timber Act? Across the landscape you can spy here and there some of the remains, the brown hull of an old house or out-building of a farm or ranch that failed, as it tilts eastward from incessant west winds and pulled by the gravity of time. Near the town of Pep, New Mexico, and I use the term "town" loosely, but it does have a post office, a few pump jacks pull oil and gas from the bowels of the earth. They bob methodically up and down like a big sluggish blue jay gleaning bugs off the ground. Ranchers that remain have bought up over time the lands that went on a sheriff?s auction or were taken over by the banks. Ranches got bigger.
The Hay Ranch is south of Pep, on the highway to Lovington. It's comprised of 50 sections of land ? that's 50 square miles - bigger than a single 36-section township in Ohio. George Hay is a third-generation Roosevelt County rancher, tall and lanky, salt-and-pepper hair, and a little hunched over from his 80-some years of ranch life. His granddad emigrated from Ohio seeking opportunity in the West. He speaks with a Texan's draw, some of the words played out a little longer than folks say elsewhere. Hay's ranch operation is less than 15 miles for the Texas state line, and many of his neighbors' ancestors were Texans by birth. Hay said that his granddad had wanderlust in Ohio ? and that the young man having itchy feet had something to do with his coming to New Mexico. He landed here and the Hay Ranch has been around since 1916. Winter wheat and cow pasture, that's what grows here. And there's the ancillary crop: quail.
I'm walking behind Candy, a high-strung bundle of bird dog nerves, a pudlepointer, an unusual breed of German stock. Brown and flat-coated, she has enough heart for the hunt for two dogs. She's well suited for desert quail hunting. Along side me is her owner, Bob King, who also owns the Santa Fe Guiding Company. King and I are walking under a skullcap dome of powdered blue graded to almost white on the horizons, broken only by a spurious bank of nimbus clouds miles away to the east. My 20 gauge rests over my shoulder in the wide open shinnery oak flats. The oaks clip my brush pants at the bottom of my shins and tag my knees at their tops. They don't get much bigger than that, and yet throw off a mast as big if not bigger than acorns from any other large towering oak species. The shinnery oaks look misfitted, out of place, with such fat acorns, like a clumsy gangly teenager looks in a poorly fit tux. An ancient windmill that probably hasn't pulled water out of the ground since the Kennedy presidency has the word ?Chicago' stenciled on galvanized metal. The blades are partly covered in wind-bourne dirt that came from somewhere west of here. Tumbleweeds and debris pile up against the wreckage of the mill, and the metal stock tank has collapsed.
The Hay Ranch and a wedge of land along the state line southward is the only place in New Mexico where you can potentially bump up scaled quail and bobwhite quail from the same cover. And speaking of same, an easterner might be taken aback at what bobwhite quail will use for cover in this harsh place. You won't find raspberry thickets and hedge rows and hawthorns - big knobs of grasses and forbs. Weedy draws of the eastern uplands are non-existent here. The smallest of hummocks and swales, the bunch grasses, mesquite and yucca provide cover the birds need from the wind, northern harriers, bird dogs, and shot-gunners like us.
Candy ranges out ahead of us, quartering between yuccas and cactus and bunch grasses. King gives a trill to hold her close enough. She's intent on finding birds. "She's birdy" said King. "She's birdy" he says again, a little louder, as her quartering tightens to a zig zag. "Whoa, Candy-girl," King commands. She's locked up tight like a spring, a skinny pencil of a tail wiggles nervously. King walks in on the point, an amorphous mass of yucca, tumbleweeds, oaks, and spindly mesquite trees. You can hear a peep or two and hear the nervousness of the birds as they rustle the brush and leaves and then the exploding whirr of wings in the wind ? a mixed covey of bobwhites and scalies. They scatter in all directions from our ankles, getting enough lift to fly low, and quick enough to make air space now. I get a remedial lesson in the predator-prey relationship, and reeducated on why prey animals aren't so easily had by predators. With the mass of quail getting up, even knowing it was coming, I still wasn't ready. I still get a start every time on the flush. And with so many birds to look at all at once going away from me in no organized fashion, your attention has to get focused on a single to be a good bird hunter. In fact, in that covey of some fifty-plus birds, we dropped three. Perhaps in that chaotic disorder of the flush is nature's splendid order that keeps bird hunting challenging despite a good smoothbore and a great dog.
It's no accident the Hay Ranch is flush with wild birds, nature's bounty. Hay has a conservation ethic and he is rooted to the ranch started by his granddad. He is motivated to do something for the birds, and "the birds" also includes a little grouse on the prairie, the lesser prairie chicken. Chicken numbers are down to say the least. But that's something King and Hay would like to see changed. Toward that end, the two men have improved the bird habitat by fencing off small parcels of land to keep cattle and pronghorn antelope out of the protected grasses. But there's a value-added component to the small fenced-off plots - they have precious water.
"There's nothing here that water won't help," said King, referring to parched shinnery oak dunes tucked between a couple of squared-off fields of winter wheat. "Water is the key element to habitat improvement; there's the water we wanted to put on the ground, but we're also adding food and some cover." And toward that end, King put time on a Ditch-Witch straight from an old ranch-house well. He buried 11 miles of hosing to get water to the fenced-off areas. There are a dozen of them so far, and the quail and lesser prairie chickens have responded well. It's no exaggeration, with my day behind the dog, we witnessed thousands of quail, both species, and at least 100 lesser prairie chickens. These grasslands look sparse and unyielding, but the loose sands, moving continuously, have fresh tracks of birds and mammals most everywhere. The sparseness of the land is deceiving.
Bird numbers are naturally cyclic, probably any avid bird hunter would agree. They naturally respond to the prevailing environment; their numbers are up for a spell, then bottom out. The ups and downs of desert quail are well-tied to moisture, and in particular to when it arrives. It's no news that bobwhite numbers aren't what they used to be. Bobwhite quail were never a dominant species in southeast New Mexico, but things have been worse than what they are today. Biologist J. Stokley Ligon wrote in his 1927 report to the New Mexico State Game Commission on the status of bobwhite quail:
"The birds evidently were most numerous in the extreme southeast corner of the state and in the Canadian River Valley, near Logan. Today there is hardly more than a trace of the native birds in this habitat. Their disappearance is wholly due to the destruction of ground cover - weeds and grasses. I was able to learn of three birds having been seen in the sandhills east of Portales, near the Texas line, in April 1926, and a few have managed to exist along the lower Dry Cimarron in Union County. Much of the eastern and southern sections of the state is suitable in altitude, topography, and climate to the bob-white, but nowhere does favorable protective cover exist continuously . . . such areas are exposed to grazing abuse."
Ligon knew the cause and effect on bird numbers. King and Hay have a cause, and are trying to effect a change - one that seems to be working.
King said he is motivated to see the chicken make a comeback. He's motivated to put hunters on birds in a wild place - to let them see things that they would never see or do otherwise.
Hunters are optimists, forward looking. They have to be. Conservation and hunters go together, because conservation is inherently an optimistic investment in the future. The number of chickens and quail I saw were some measure; the work on the Hay Ranch is measurably paying dividends with the private-land stewardship and some sweat equity.
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