HILLSBORO, Ohio — Highland County farmers and partners hoping to bring back the “bob-white” whistle have established the Fallsville Quail Heritage Area to encourage the repopulation of bobwhite quail, a native species of concern in Ohio. Forty-two landowners gathered to establish the state’s first quail focus area, approximately 10,000 acres of predominantly private land.

The Fallsville and Fallsville South Wildlife Areas, public lands, are included.

“The concept of a focus area is to focus on a specific habitat needs for a specific species or group of species – in this case, quail,” explained John Kaiser, Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Wildlife (DOW). “We’re working on improving the habitat on our public land area, Fallsville, with a variety of wildlife habitat management practices; we’re also working with landowners to do the same thing.”

Bobwhite quail are present in the area in far fewer numbers than in the past. Area farmer Jeff Boike, who signed land into the focus area, saw quail everywhere in the 1970s; last year he saw maybe six or eight.

“Ohio State University has done intensive bobwhite quail population monitoring and their research has shown that, especially in this northeastern corner of this focus area, from when they started in 2008 until now, populations have declined significantly,” Kaiser said.

Partners in the quail focus area – the DOW, Pheasants and Quail Forever, the National Wild Turkey Federation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – will be providing technical assistance to Highland County landowners who want to restore populations of bobwhite.

Highland County has good landscape topography for quail, and the county is active in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), said Barbara Bauer, Pheasants and Quail Forever’s farm bill wildlife biologist.

“I think that is why we’ve held onto the birds that we have,” she explained. “Quail are an edge species and the CRP fields have edges that they utilize. They need smaller fields, maybe idle areas, or shrub areas, like where blackberries and raspberries would be.

“In the winter, quail have a covey of 10 to 15 birds. They stay together to keep their heat. The birds separate in the spring. An interesting feature of what they do (is) the female will make a nest, the male will sit on the first nest and then she’ll go make another nest. They can have 12 eggs in each nest, and each pair of birds can have three nests.”

One of the positives of this project is landowners within this focus area can work with the low-yielding areas of their crop fields, along edges and odd areas, to improve the habitat for bobwhite quail, Kaiser explained. “They do not need to take a lot of land out of agricultural production.”

Boike will be putting in 30-foot strips of grasses and flowering plants around woods, or along creeks, to provide quail habitat.

The quail focus area is a voluntary program and part of the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative (NBCI). NBCI is a grouping of agencies and conservation organizations in all the states that have bobwhite quail. It requires monitoring of the quail and the habitat.

“I hope it makes an improvement,” Boike said. “We’ve supposedly got one of the highest quail populations in the state in this area, and we don’t see that many quail. It sounds like a critical situation for quail in the state.”