First off, kudos to PharmVet for taking the initiative to try and rebuild a wild population of quail. You never really know if it will work unless you try it. Kind of like a laboratory experiment, you never know if your hypothesis is true or not unless you test it.

IMO - the single most causative factor is habitat change (or as wildlife biologists often call it 'changes in land use'), with added contributions from whatever everyone else has mentioned in this thread. From the people I have talked to, the landscape across E. Texas has drastically changed over the past decades, and this is also believed to contribute to the loss of turkey populations in this region of the state. On a possible related note, habitat change has been strongly linked with the demise of pheasants across most of its prior range in the NE and many of the midwest farm states. For instance, southeast PA used to have one of the most populous pheasant populations in the US, now there are virtually no wild birds in any of PA. Changes in farming practice, for good or for bad, have contributed to the loss of native habitat for wild pheasants. Not sure if the same can be said of E. Texas quail? I also agree that depredation by hawks are an important factor. Many years ago it wasn't so uncommon to shoot a hawk, especially if you had vested interest such as farm animals. Again I am extrapolating this information from my experience growing up in PA from a long lineage of dairy farmers. Hawks were viewed as a major enemy to farmers. Not sure if this can be applied to E. TX quail? Hopefully nobody reads too much into this post, I am not advocating shooting hawks or any other bird species illegal to harvest, and I am certainly not anti-farmer.

I hunted and quail on national forest land and my deer lease in East Texas near Toledo Bend. Yes, public land has quail. However, the numbers will not sustain a bunch of hunts. It takes a lot of road time scouting places to hunt. I had family up there and would hunt around some of the old home places. We would find quail near these areas. We found as many as 13 coveys on one tract of national forest land. Once you find a covey, that covey would be in that general area year after year. On private places, new clear cuts would produce good habitat the first years. When the quail numbers were down we started hunting woodcock. In a good migration year, we would point 20-30 woodcock in a morning's hunt. That was plenty to shoot a limit of woodcock. Since they hold so well, they are great for training dogs. We hunted the area so much that our dogs learned where to look for woodcock. They would always go straight to the perfect habitat for woodcock. Hunting in east Texas is a lot of work and requires a lot of walking. The habitat is great for the dogs. The sand hills and pine straw made it easy on the dogs.

I sure miss hunting up there.

Works on cottontails too.

The general 'public' are also bad about shooting too many birds out of a covey. They will follow the birds (until they've scattered too badly to do so) and shoot as many birds as they can. That will quickly ruin a covey.

Sadly, there is little hunting etiquette practiced on public land!

I agree with Pharmvet. I just came in from being on the tractor creating fire breaks and will hopefully burn next week. I am attempting to bring back native habitat with varying degrees of success.

I am also a member of WNBRI (Western Navarro Bobwhite Restoration Initiative). As private landowners we are working to bring back wild quail that was once in this area again with varying degrees of success. Some members have native quail on their land. Each year we do whistle counts. Just this last year we were involved in quail relocation to a member's ranch. Several of the quail were radio collared and to date are still in the area. This will be an ongoing effort.

My 2 cents as to decline, habitat loss. If there is not a place for feeding, nesting and escape; there is no place to live. It takes a lot of contiguous acres for a sustainable population to survive.

While hunting last week we saw a red tail hawk sitting in a tree and he was close enough we could have killed him but we don't bother them. Dog pointed maybe a hundred yards from where Mr. Hawk was sitting and we shot the covey. One bird did the helicopter thing and I guess it got the hawks attention because he came and got the bird before the hunter could make the retrieve. No big deal but it happens. Still not going to shoot a hawk.