We had wild quail in VA well up into the 1970s. Thanks to "clean" farming by former suburbanites who demanded well-groomed country 'estates', out of control predator populations due to restrictions on shooting hawks and owls, the collapse of the fur market under siege by Hollywood glitterati which helped ground predator populations to explode, and perhaps the most underated of all, the burgeoning population of feral cats, it is almost unknown to see a quail off of game farm property today. The exact same criteria torpedoed the wonderful native pheasant hunting we had in north central MD just below the PA border in approximately the same time period. When you drive up into that country today, you occasionally see people pulled over in stopped cars trying to get a cell phone picture of a rooster. Millenial locals tell me it is quite and event.
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