Stocker Cattle and Quail: A Workable Relationship
Stocker cattle can give ranchers a flexible tool for quail habitat management.
By Gary DiGiuseppe
For quail and cattle to co-exist, range conditions can’t be too good, or too bad. Habitat-conscious ranchers across Texas are striving to find that happy medium.
“The best quail habitat is not ‘excellent’ condition rangeland,” says Dr. Dale Rollins, Texas AgriLife Extension wildlife specialist. “It would be ‘fair’ or ‘good’ condition rangeland.” The lower the condition score, the more weeds there are for the birds, although Rollins adds, “When you move west, then typically you need a higher range condition score, because you’re going to have the weeds, regardless.”
To make sure there’s enough cover for the quail, but enough grass for cattle, some producers are turning to stockers. Rollins says a typical scenario would be to bring in stockers in November, and move them out 5 to 6 months later in May.
“The person who can go into the situation using 50 to 70 percent of their grazing capacity for cows, and then can flesh out the rest in stocker animals, will have a lot greater flexibility,” he says. This mix, he says, “improves your ability to adjust the numbers when it gets dry, which is a really critical time to adjust stocking rates for quail.” The important thing, he says, is that quail nest in grass. Leave at least half of the grass on the land for that purpose.
Stockers becoming more popular with recreational landowners
The popularity of this management method is growing with the increasing amount of Texas rangeland being bought by recreational managers. They need the cattle for grazing, Rollins says, but they don’t want to get into the cattle business. Although stockers are more risky economically, they’re less risky ecologically.
“If you get caught in a dry spell with a bunch of cows and you start trying to feed them your profits get wiped out pretty quickly, and it’s hard on your range when you continue to keep that number of mouths out there,” he says.
A rebound this fall?
The conditions are right for the quail population to rebound from last year’s bust. Last fall and winter were wet, and early summer brought more rain.
“Coming out of this winter people thought they had hardly any quail,” says Rollins, “and everybody was relieved to hear birds whistling. The big question is did we achieve critical mass to have enough breeder birds out there to produce us a good dividend of quail? I would say at this point, most of us are surprised how many birds we’re hearing, so we hope that we can at least make up some ground and that we have another decent year this coming year. Maybe we can get back up to where we’d like to see the populations.”
Rollins says extensive grazing management and brush management have made a major difference over the last 20 years in making the landscape more suitable for quail and other wildlife. Rollins describes brush sculpting as “basically the acknowledgement that, ‘Brush is important, and I need some level of brush, so I’m looking for a compromise between my cattle operations and my wildlife operation.’”
It has to be planned; the landowner needs to, as Rollins puts it, “judge with heightened awareness” what brush should stay and what should go before entering the field with a tractor or sending out the aerial applicators.
Rollins also encourages landowners to consider prescribed burning, which can help to control infestations of prickly pear and overpopulation of eastern red cedar and other brush species.
“Burning does a lot of things,” he says. “I call it a crescent wrench, because it’s adjustable for a lot of situations. It’s good for your livestock operations. It’s good for the land management. It’s great for wildlife.”
Cooperative management
In West Texas, where land holdings are larger and there’s more native grass, a rancher has enough property to create favorable habitat. From I-35 and to the east, it’s more problematic.
“You can’t manage quail or deer on 20 acres,” says Rollins. “You have to have a larger footprint.” This is where cooperatives and wildlife associations come in, stringing together enough managed acreage to make a difference.
One such organization is the Wildlife Habitat Federation, whose president, Jim Willis, ranches in Cat Spring in the Coastal Prairie region. He says, while a lot of people want more quail and other upland game, he and a few other landowners decided to do something about it.
“In the first year, we probably amassed at around 30,000 acres, and that was probably about 30 or 40 landowners,” Willis says. The group has grown since then, but there are different levels of dedication. “I would say the people who are actively pursuing habitat restoration in our group are probably a couple of handfuls, and that’s it,” he says. “But I’d say those people who are doing it are to be commended, and I think we have something to show for it.”
What they have is a “livestock corridor” that extends from Willis’ ranch for 7 miles to the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge at Eagle Lake. The refuge “is about a 2,000-acre facility for preserving mainly the Attwater Prairie Chicken, but it also is a good quail factory, too,” says Willis, laughing.
He says the corridor is mainly contiguous, and varies from 150 feet to a mile wide. “That’s sort of the epicenter of our project,” Willis says. “It varies by locale, but here close to us we’ve gone from a handful of quail and hardly ever seeing or hearing them, to — one year — going to a bird an acre.”
Those are boom levels, he says, and indicative of the health of the land. “Quail is sort of the common denominator, the canary in a coal mine indicator species,” says Willis, noting Texas A&M has found 31 species of upland birds in the restored area. Deer and rabbits are present, as are predators, but as Willis says, “If you don’t have prey, you don’t have predators.”
And he says he’s getting more out of fewer cows. Although he’s only running one cow every 10 acres, “we don’t have to fertilize, and we haven’t fed a bale of hay in over two years. We don’t have any machinery costs — we don’t have to put up hay. You’re not out feeding in the cold winter.”
And although they’ve returned to “the way it was originally started when the buffalo roamed,” Willis says he could see the difference during a recent 2-year drought — he had plenty of grass, but on the other side of the property line “all you could see was cow manure and dirt. Natives are drought-tolerant. They’re not the total answer, but they’re a better answer than having to pay for $600-per-ton fertilizer.”
Dr. Neal Wilkins, director of the Texas A&M Institute of Renewable Natural Resources, points to Willis’ Federation as an example of a group that’s restoring native grassland for the right reasons.
Wilkins says, “Some of the biggest efforts for habitat restoration have come from the landowners who really, at least in the near future, don’t stand a chance of getting a huge quail population. But what they do have is kind of a restoration ethic for their land, and they’re good land stewards.”
Wilkins says a major repopulation obstacle faced by quail has been the conversion of their native habitat to coastal bermudagrass and other introduced pasture grasses. Although those conversions have their benefits, there are some places where the parcels are no longer large enough to economically graze cattle or harvest hay. These are candidates to be returned to native grassland that could support both cattle and quail.
Many of the successes, Wilkins says, have been in Willis’ area, Washington and Austin Counties.
“It’s expensive, on one hand,” he concedes, “but on the other hand it seems to be worth it to a lot of landowners, and particularly those who want to see and hear quail and, maybe in a few years, even be able to hunt quail in that part of south central Texas again.”
Other species benefit as well. “In some parts of south central Texas, we’ve had really poor fawn crops over the last few decades or so,” Wilkins says. “That’s mainly due to poor fawning habitat. White-tailed deer like to hide their fawns in relatively tall, native grassland, and so restoration of native grasslands … has really helped in increasing the value of habitat for fawning of white-tailed deer. Also, wild turkey habitat depends on having some areas of good, high-quality nesting habitat.”
As Rollins notes, where many smaller landowners need to work together to make an impact on the local ecology, one dedicated family with a bigger operation can also make a difference. Nine years ago, Rod and Mary Hench acquired the Wild Wings Ranch in the Scurry County town of Hermleigh. They’ve been turning the property into kind of an oasis for game species.
At a little more than 6,000 acres, Wild Wings had been a working horse and cattle ranch. It had been grazed hard, resulting in excessive prickly pear cactus and overgrowth of mesquite and red juniper. Native grasses had suffered from the overgrazing, and from too much shade from a heavy canopy.
The Henches had long had an interest in wildlife. For a time, they outfitted on a 40,000-acre ranch just west of them in Garza County. Rod Hench says, “We’re like so many people who go into something new. I’d walked through ranchland, hunting, for years, just like all hunters, but you walk right past all that stuff and you really don’t pay that much attention until you actually purchase the property and start.”
But rather than trial-and-error, their endeavors have been systematic. “We asked a lot of questions, and there are a lot of good people who will help and are willing to help if you take a ranch like this and you’re going to manage it basically for wildlife.”
Some of his neighbors, Hench says, have been managing their land for wildlife habitat for 30 years. Combined with Wild Wings, they encompass 20,000 acres. “That really helps,” he says. “We are a low-fenced operation, and even though they harvest a few deer, they don’t take many. They protect their quail when quail numbers are down. So it really has made a nice situation.”
Hench also runs stockers, which he says make operating the ranch more feasible financially. When they arrived they engaged in brush sculpting to bring the mesquite and cedar under control. “We have been able to increase our vegetation,” he says. “Then you get to the other point where you want to control some of that vegetation. You don’t want it so overgrown. So, by limiting our numbers, but going ahead and putting [stocker cattle] on there, and normally rotating, we’re able to control some of the vegetation.”
The Henches have now brush sculpted the entire ranch, although some areas still need to be thinned. They’re moving on to new projects. Most recently, they’ve divided the ranch into 160- to 200-acre rectangles, and then split each of those into quadrants.
“Each year,” Hench says, “we take one of those quadrants and we either roller-chop it or prescribed burn to try to create new habitat.” That produces a “kitchen” of new vegetative growth. Quail, he explains, won’t travel far if everything they need for nesting and loafing habitat is within reach. “Rather than burn a massive area of, say, 1,000 acres, we end up actually doing a fourth of the ranch a year until we’re finished,” he says.
He plans to rest the acreage the fifth year, and after that he will gauge the need based on rainfall — the ranch averages 21 inches a year, which Hench says is crucial if it arrives at the right time.
With all of the people who have helped them with their plans, the Henches are returning the favor, offering their own expertise. “You would think ranch management would be an exact science,” he says. “I really thought when we bought the ranch there would be, ‘You do A, B, C. This is the way it goes.’
“You find out that it really isn’t that way, but there are people who know a lot more about it than we do. Then you kind of have to talk, and go to the clinics and visit. You sort through all that and take the approach that you’re going to take, and try to have a very good reason for doing so.”
They’ve hosted groups from USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and from wildlife organizations.
He says the local NRCS is establishing a liaison who will get information from them and convey it to other landholders. “We’re on-site,” he explains. “We do our own work, we have our own equipment. A lot of these people who purchase recreational land of course are absentee owners. They may live in Dallas, Georgia, North Carolina. They come from all over to purchase recreational land. But they really need some help on what’s the best thing to do.”
“Stocker Cattle and Quail” is excerpted from the September 2010 issue of The Cattleman magazine.