Saving a Texas rite of passage, one ranch at a time

In Texas, quail equals money. It’s “the sexy wildlife species,” as one rancher put it. Hunters love to bag the small ground-dwelling birds. Ranchers are eager to attract them. But the quail population has declined precipitously along with the grasslands that make up their native range — victims of lost habitat, overgrazing, drought and changing farm practices. Alarmed, the Texas Legislature appropriated $4 million in 2013 for quail research by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and $2 million for studies of the bobwhite quail by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. Kelly Reyna is already digging in. Two years ago, Reyna, executive director of UNT Quail, a new research and landowner extension program, envisioned cobbling together enough landowners to form a 50,000-acre corridor where the prized but increasingly scarce game bird can thrive. “I thought if I could just get three or four ranchers, it would be enough to take me through to retirement,” said Reyna, 41, a Flower Mound native who has raised $500,000 for the research program at the University of North Texas and hopes to attract $1.5 million more. He figured it might take years to persuade enough ranchers to participate in a plan to reverse decades of habitat destruction. But Reyna’s sales pitch was unique: Grazing cattle, squeezing a living out of a ranch and sustaining bobwhites were all part of the equation. And his phone started ringing. Plenty of landowners, as it turned out, were intrigued by the idea of a quail restoration effort that tapped the synergy among habitat, wildlife and livestock. Reyna has signed up 47 landowners with 565,000 acres, or about 882 square miles. He’s in discussions with ranchers who own an additional 100,000 acres. “It has been amazing. It has gotten really big, really fast,” he said...more

Ain't it amazin' what you can do on private property with a voluntary program.