Bobwhite Quail, Wild Turkeys, & Insects

There was a time when Bobwhite Quail, Wild Turkeys, & Insects were not three things that I’d put together in a sentence.  Yet, as I grow older, my thirst for knowledge seems to grow more and more, driven by my desire to fully understand the things I value and to share that understanding with others.  Somewhere between Herbert Stoddard and Aldo Leopold the fact was born and put into words that to manage a property, maximizing the health and abundance of one species would be to the neglect of others.  This is true.  Different wildlife take different habitat requirements. To manage a property with the goal of maximizing the health and abundance of white-tailed deer, for instance, wouldn’t require the thought of insect availability.  To manage a property for wild turkey or quail, however, most certainly does.

For a lot of us, “managing habitat” is defined by what it takes to make the most favorable environment or set of conditions for the game species we love to hunt.  If I were forced to rank the game species that I value from first to last, Wild Turkey would top the list; Deer would be second; Rabbits and Squirrels, third; and Bob-white Quail would bring up the rear.  If I lived in the midwest or an area of the country that harbored Elk, Antelope, Mule Deer, & other Big Game Species, my personal ranking may be tweaked just a bit.  It might also include pheasant, grouse, & others still.  A Turkey’s gobble thundering through the spring woods and their unmatched display of colors will always be tough to top.  Rankings, though, can be misleading.  It might steer one to believe that I’d be content having one expanse of field and forest that had only the most vocal, iridescent gobblers you’ve ever seen.  I wouldn’t be.  For me, that would be like reading a newspaper that only the same woodsy article every time.  If it were like the Newspapers that Leon Neel used to read with his father as a little boy, it would only include one set of the same animal tracks each and every edition (Sutter & Way, 2012).  For most land managers, regardless of how we might rank our favorite game species, we appreciate and value others to the point that we want to keep them around.  The point is, that while I might be a turkey guy, the similarities between young quail and turkey poults dietary requirements is worthy of understanding.  Although I might not yet  hunt quail or hold them to the same esteem that I hold turkeys, I value their presence on the lands I am privileged to steward; and, if forced to choose, would seek to have less numbers of any and all game species so that I could walk amongst them all.

Wild turkey poults, just after they crack through the membrane of the egg and say hello to the world, could fit inside of a baseball 2 at a time.  2 Quail chicks, on the other hand, could fit inside of a ping pong ball pretty easily.  The survival of both of these ground nesting birds is directly linked to the availability of food within a certain proximity to the nest in the days and weeks post-hatch.  Not only that, but a certain type of food – Insects!  In 1931, C.O Handley in Food of the Young found in Herbert Stoddard’s the “Bobwhite Quail: Its Habit, Preservation, & Increase”, estimated that, “of the food of 20 chicks under two weeks of age, 83.7 % consisted of animal matter.”  54 years later, William Healy would publish data on the feeding habitats of wild turkey poults 1-4 weeks of age.  When we average the percentage of animal matter in the poults’ diets across the six different habitat types in Mr. Healy’s study, 83.9% is the result (Healy, 1985).  Whereas the management of land for Bobwhite Quail and Wild Turkey might differ slightly, one thing is obvious – any management strategy better include the thought of insects and their availability.

Food Availability

Food availability for these youngsters comes in two parts:  1) The actual presence of the necessary foods they need on a specific site and 2) Their ability to get to it, i.e. is it within reach?  Further extrapolating that thought, are the insects closer to the ground and within a certain distance from the nest site?  After all, birds that are smaller than a baseball and ping pong ball at birth, can only do so much traveling before depleting their energy reserves.  To quote Chamberlain and others in “Behavior and Movement of Wild Turkey Broods”, “Wild Turkey Poults and similar precocial hatchlings require consistent forage intake with minimal energy expenditure for days after hatching; hence it is logical that stressors associated with increased daily movements within 3 days of hatching would negatively influence brood survival.”  Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that excess movements makes both wild turkey poults and young bobwhite  more susceptible to predation and death by different means, like hypothermia in wet, cooler times.

The “within reach” portion of this discussion on food availability is also important.  Like many of you, I have stands of lush clover that can be filled with a horde of bugs at times – crickets, grasshoppers, bees, you name it.  And too, I’ve examined the crops of several turkeys I’ve been fortunate to kill – they’ll nip the heads off of clover stolons quite readily.  But, due to the density of the these clover stands at ground level, wild turkey poults and quail chicks are unable to use these these plots safely and efficiently like they can other open areas.  If forced to use these areas shortly after hatching, broods could become even more susceptible to episodes of cold and wet induced fatigue, which can certainly lead to increased predation and natural mortality.  If you’ve ever walked through a dense strand of clover or other vegetation early in the morning or following a rain, you understand.  The same lack of availability can also be true for other food plots that we may plant for other wild things, like white-tailed deer.  It’s not necessarily because the bugs aren’t there, it’s that young birds just can’t access them.

When it comes to the increased use of open areas and their respective insect availability, compared to forested land-types, I hypothesize this is due to the fact that young birds are able to find insects in areas of early succession more readily because they are concentrated closer to the ground and not hidden by layers of leaf litter.  Leaf litter can also suppress grasses and forbs that might otherwise be hospitable to insects in the optimal zone of 0-8 inches above the ground (Hurst, 1972).  This would go hand in hand with the fact that use of forested landscapes increases as birds age – at that point they are able to scratch through the fine forest fuels as we’ve all seen.

What is the travel threshold?

The distance from nest site to a bug-filled paradise for wild turkey broods should be +- 875 yards (Chamberlain et. al, 2020).  To put this differently, a circle with a radius of 875 yards is comprised of approximately 495 +- Acres.  So, if you’re a hunter or landowner with 500 acres that is otherwise hospitable to wild turkeys, having centrally located brood habitat could certainly aid in increasing poult recruitment or survival to adulthood.  For Bobwhites, who’s home ranges average 40-200 acres, the maximum radius or distance from the nest site that young Bobwhite would need to travel is 556 +- Yards, assuming less than optimal habitat quality.  For quail, having good bugging grounds centrally located across 200 +- acres could theoretically lead to increased populations on your property.

What is good bugging ground?

Going back to Healy’s 1985 publication, “Turkey Poult Feeding Activity, Invertebrate Abundance, and Vegetation Structure”,  we can infer that the best bugging grounds were “open, grass” and “open, grass/forb” communities.  Numerous researches before and after have noted the same – It is imperative to have open areas of early succession plant communities situated within close proximity of nesting cover.  However, having open, field-like areas or canopy gaps is not enough.  Disturbance of these areas on a periodic rotation is absolutely crucial to their diversity and open nature.  In other words, you won’t have open areas long if you don’t do what is necessary to keep them that way.

Studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between the use of prescribed fire and insect abundance and availability (Hurst, 1972).  In addition to diversifying the flora and fauna that might inhabit a given location over time, fire does much to create the necessary bare-ground thoroughfares that chicks and poults need to access insects and seeds without over-exerting themselves.

Brood Habitat in Moore County, NC managed with Rx Fire & Strip Disking

Concluding Remarks

Sparks et. al. 1998. Effects of Late Growing Season and Late Dormant Season Prescribed Fire on Herbaceous Vegetation in Restored Pine-Grassland Communities. The Journal of Vegetation Science, Feb., 1998 Vol. 9 No. 1 pp. 133-142.

Sutter, Paul S. and Way, Albert G. 2010. The Art of Managing Longleaf: 50.