Check Wikipedia. The article holds that the fire ant was introduced to the South in 1930 from a ship docked at Mobile. I thought it was a fairly recent immigrant.

The wild quail had nearly disappeared from Southern Illinois where I'm from by the time I got old enough to hunt, we never had the fire ant and still don't. These days, in that area, you could hunt with a good dog five days a week and be lucky to find one covey. Two words are what's killing our small game and those two words are farm chemicals.

Destry

Jent - I helped spread fire ant killer in Texas about 5 years ago. The man who bought the stuff would not have bought anything illegal, and whatever the stuff was, it sure controlled those ants

Jent,

That's all well and good, I'm sure ants do kill quail. But how do you explain them disappearing from Southern Illinois when there were no fire ants at all? There were just as many quail there in the 50's and 60's as there were in your area of the south.


Destry

We can purchase fire ant poison in Texas at the Hardware stores in any quanity from "yard" size to "ranch size".The stuff works well,it is grandular in form.The littlt b-----ds take it down the nest and feed it to the queen..kills them DEAD..
Biggest problem here is loss of habitat..my best quail areas of just a few years ago now have malls on them...Bill

The place where I first had a covey of quail scare me sh----- in Maryland is now a parking lot for a condominium complex. There wasn't even a maintained road to the place 50 years ago and now it is full of people and their cars. Very sad as it doesn't really make a very good place for people but it sure was nice for quail and 300 yards away was great duck shooting on the North East river.

Folks - we live in a sad and terrifying time for our beloved non-migratory gamebirds. Grouse, feral pheasant and gentleman Bob.

I think fire ants are a very valid theory but it has been proven as both a factor and as a non-factor. Just as the spread of disease through mold and chemical on deer corn piles, chemicals ingested through eating soybeans, the isolation of suitable habitat due to development, etc etc etc.

My chips are on a disease. Or some major chain in the plants that make-up their diet.

Or round-up?

One thing for sure is that they havent just disappeared - they have disappeared. Yet no one but a few remaining bird hunters seem to care.

My father is out and about around the country quite a bit and he said he knows of exactly one covey of wild quail that can be found on a regular basis there around home. Plenty of cover for them down home, lots of public land that isn't farmed, etc etc. It just seems to me that if you look at the time frame of when all these chemical fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides came into such general use you'll find a correlation. In Southern Illinois they were essentially gone by the late 70's. Roundup was first marketed in 1973.....


Destry

Three weeks ago out by Cimmaron I put up four decent coveys in a half mile walk along a crop/ brush border. No Round Up was used this year on it but last year in the same place Round Up was used and I put up three coveys. No fire ants out there, but plenty of coyotes and hawks.

Friends in eastern MO tell me they are getting quail back by leaving cover for them and trapping/shooting predators.

Wouldn't know about other parts of the country but looking at the first picture of the tall pines and short grass, I wouldn't see that as quail cover. I'm used to finding quail in this stuff, and here is my dog holding a covey: