Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Gardner
In the fall of 76 I was introduced to quail hunting in East Central Indiana by a friend whose father had several pointers. We would load of his fathers dogs in the back of my Camero, throw vests and guns in the trunk and head off, getting home just in time to clean guns and clean the few birds we were able to scratch out, then clean out my car before I picked up my girlfriend. Everyone reminisces about the winter of 77-78 but the winter of 76-77 was pretty brutal as well. I still remember driving on country roads "punching through" drifts that winter trying to get to coverts.
I was a senior in high school the following year. Record snowfall and unheard of low temps kept me out of the fields from mid-January through the end of February. When we finally did get out the only coveys we found had frozen together under the snow and ice. Two brutal winters brought the end of quail hunting in Indiana - there weren't huntable numbers after then and, to my knowledge, there really aren't huntable numbers today. Not saying it was just because of the weather (farming practices and predators have changed the ecosystem forever) but back to back hard winters spelled the beginning of the end. ...AND THE WEATHER TAKETH AWAY is right.
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Jay,
I was in SE Ohio in grad school during the years you mention, and I do recall two particularly bad storms, probably the ones you mentioned.
We had a fiercely cold and snowy late winter here in Northern Missouri in 1983. I, like you, found frozen quail, and it was after a stretch of bad weather like that at the end of the 1980s that took our pheasants from us. They never recovered and are not particularly common today when in the mid-80s we used to flush 40-50 birds from CRP fields in late winter.
I'm sure you are correct in your surmise that those storms were the beginning of the end of your huntable quail populations. When the habitat is marginal and then they get hammered by bad weather, there's little they can do.