Habitat & Conservation  |  12/05/2024

How fall covey counts track the impact of habitat restoration


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Surveys provide critical insight into management practices for Northern Bobwhite Quail

By Rachel Holt

USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service Working Lands for Wildlife’s (WLFW) ongoing mission is to restore habitat for wildlife while benefitting landowners.   

As part of the WLFW Northern Bobwhite, Grasslands & Savannas framework, it is important to evaluate how management practices are working. To accomplish this, Quail Forever has partnered with the University of Georgia to establish a range-wide outcomes assessment protocol.  

Outcomes assessments are conducted throughout the year in threefold: spring point counts, summer vegetation surveys and fall covey counts. While all these surveys are critically important, fall covey counts stand out as one of the more complex yet valuable surveys. 

Fall covey counts refer to the process of listening and counting bobwhite covey calls from mid-October through the first week of December, according to Brittany Welch, Quail Forever (QF) bobwhite and grassland birds outcomes assessment coordinator.

Welch said covey counts, summer vegetation surveys and spring point counts work together to evaluate the success of conservation practices. By linking vegetation response to the number of covey calls, researchers can hopefully detect change over time.   

“It's important for fall covey counts to be conducted,” Welch said. “When they're done in combination with the spring point counts and summer vegetation surveys, it captures a change over the year and captures that seasonality aspect of it.”

Outcomes assessments are voluntary for landowners. For those who participate, audio recording units (ARUs) are deployed on their properties over ten days to capture covey calls. Of these participating landowners, 25% of the properties will also be randomly selected for in-person counts. Quail Forever Farm Bill biologists and outcomes assessment technicians will spend an hour on site, twice per season, listening for and counting calls.  

According to David Tilson, research coordinator for outcomes assessment at the University of Georgia, these in-person counts are used as a “call index” to validate ARU recordings, helping distinguish between calls from different coveys to ensure data accuracy.

Once in-person counts and ARUs are completed, the data is sent to the university, where recordings are converted to spectrograms—a visual representation of how sound energy is distributed across frequencies and over time. 

Although complex, Tilson said outcomes assessments are important because they follow an adaptive management approach — a method that allows work to get done on the ground while monitoring its effectiveness. Adaptive management enables NRCS and QF biologists to partner with landowners to tweak conservation planning in real-time.  

“We're living in an age where there are more conservation concerns and less funding,” Tilson said. “So learning how to make the process more efficient so that we can use our dollars wisely and see the responses that we want in this age of underfunding is incredibly important." 

This is only the second year of outcomes assessments in its five-year project. According to Tilson, the data collected so far is insufficient to yield any significant or reliable results. However, in three years, they will be able to compile all their data and hopefully produce meaningful insights into the effectiveness of various management practices.  

Welch said outcomes assessments are important because they fill a missing gap of knowledge for bobwhites in the Southeast and Midwest, regions that consist largely of private land. 

“It's easy to do conservation practices on public state land because that's the goal of those spaces,” Welch said. “But when you can encourage conservation on these private lands, you're raising the bar for how much you can get done.”


Rachel Holt is a regional WLFW communications specialist at Quail Forever. She can be reached at rholt@quailforever.org.