You’re liable to get shot if you tried that today.
Going to have cattle on one place this winter so figured I needed to put up some barbed wire around a ground blind in a waterway.
(note to self, don't loan out the post driver, you may need it, and a 16lb sledgehammer sucks!)
Phone started ringing and it was the county game warden. He was on another place of ours and had collared two trespassers that had poached 4 quail.
Wanted to know if they had permission and if not what did I want him to do.
Hang em high and let them swing was my answer.
They were from Prague Ok. They drove almost 300 miles to kill 4 quail. The fines will be almost $800 each plus their expenses of driving that far.
That covey had 10 birds in it as of last week. I was going to hunt them this coming week to get a couple for us and maybe a rooster.
Now, all there is left will have to be for breeding stock for next year.
Can't even hunt my own place because the poachers have ruined it and hunting season isn't over yet. Nobody knows how many times that strip of grass will be hit and more quail poached.
Game warden told me that this season trespassing is the worst he's seen it. With the covid, there is nothing much to do I guess other than drive the country roads and road hunt. He agreed.
With snow on the ground tomorrow, I'm sure the road hunters will be out in force.
I'll be watching our farms and the neighbors property as well.
https://oklahoman.com/article/25874...-hawks-owls-are-greatest-threats-to-bobwhites
Quail mortality rates do not really change much due to hunting pressure. You can still take a few birds out of that covey if you want. I knew one of the biologists that conducted the Packsaddle study. Mortality rates during the study didn't change even when the birds were not hunted. It stayed between 80-85%. If the hunters didn't take them, predators or other causes of death did. Even in areas that received zero hunting pressure, the mortality rate was the same. Where birds had the s*** shot out of them, the mortality rate was steady.
It's about "natural" habitat. If you have good "natural" habitat that holds birds, you can shoot a covey down to zero, and during the shuffle, birds will move into that habitat.
All of the things that I grew up hearing; all of the things I just knew as gospel about quail, turned out to just be a bunch of BS, passed down thru the generations. It was mostly just crap, but it all sounded good and made sense, right up until it didn't.
Go shoot your birds if you want, or don't. They're on your place. You do what you want to do.
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You know, they never went back for their guns.
Is everybody else seeing @dennishoddy 's pictures? For some reason, they haven't been showing up for me the last couple of days.
I can't see them.
I can't see them either..
@dennishoddy - what have you changed about the way you post pics? Several of us can't see them now. I think the last pic you posted that I could see was the one of your latest european mount ready to go on the wall.
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