A decent quail season is expected

By Ed Godfrey Comments 0
Published: November 8, 2009

Oklahoma’s quail season opens Saturday, and it should be better than recent years.

The state Wildlife Department’s October roadside surveys were disappointing, but Doug Schoeling, upland bird biologist for the agency, said there were only a few dry days to conduct the surveys.

Will bird dogs find many bobwhites this year? Most say this quail season should be better than last, but still not great. Photo by Ed Godfrey, The Oklahoman

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"The survey was actually down, but the field reports I’ve been getting have been positive,” Schoeling said. "They’ve been seeing more quail than the last couple of years.

"I am pretty optimistic. I think it will be a decent quail season. It is going to be better than the last couple of years, but I wouldn’t expect it to be phenomenal by any means.”

Both Sue Selman, who owns the historic Selman ranch in Harper County, and Danny Pierce, who operates Rush Creek Guide Service in Reydon and has thousands of acres leased in western Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, both think this season will be the best in the last four years.

Texas’ quail season opened last weekend, and Pierce found birds on his first hunt of the season around Wheeler, Texas.

”We found 10 coveys not hunting very hard, just knocking around,” he said. "I was real pleased with what we moved. The coveys had 30-plus birds in them. It looks pretty good.”

Pierce said the problem this year might not be a lack of birds but a lack of bird hunters. For the first time in 30 years, no one booked a hunt on the opening day of the Texas quail season.

Since Texas and Oklahoma are one of the few places left with wild birds, quail season usually attracts numerous hunters from across the country.

Apparently, the poor economy has hit the hunting and fishing industry.

"Nobody is traveling and hunting. My next hunt is two weeks away,” Pierce said Tuesday. "We are not getting the calls either. I never in 30 years didn’t have a group of guys that didn’t want to be here on opening day.”

Part of the reason is bird hunters don’t like hot weather, but "the economy is a big part of it,” Pierce said.

Pierce has slashed prices on his guided deer hunts because of fewer hunters this season.

"I think the quail hunters will still come when they find out there are birds,” he said.

Snagging for paddlefish curtailed

The Oklahoma Wildlife Conservation Commission passed regulations Monday that will restrict paddlefishing in northeastern Oklahoma.

Paddlefishing is getting more popular during the spring spawning runs as more spoonbills are being harvested by anglers.

Oklahoma anglers are allowed to keep one paddlefish per day, but under the rules passed Monday, fishing will be catch and release only on two days of the week — Friday and Monday.

Spring River, above Grand Lake, also will be closed to snagging for paddlefish. A spawning ground for paddlefish, it will be a sanctuary for spoonbills.

Anglers also will be required to write the date and time of harvest on the back of their paddlefish permit at the time of catch.

Brent Gordon, northeast fisheries supervisor for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, said the new rules are a precaution to protect the population.

Almost all of the paddlefish that were caught by anglers last season were in the same age class, 10 years old, he said.

"We had nothing below it or above it. It was just a lot of the same year fish,” Gordon said. "We didn’t see anything (another age class) coming on for three or four years. We want to protect what we have before the next group comes along”

Anglers also have complained about the lack of big fish, and the new restrictions should lead to larger sizes of spoonbills.

"We have very liberal regulations compared to anyone else,” Gordon said. "You can take one (paddlefish) a day here, where everywhere else, like North Dakota, you can only take one per season.”

Snagging at night at the low water dam between Lake Fort Gibson and Lake Hudson also will be forbidden under the new rules.

"That was done for law enforcement reasons,” Gordon said. "There was a lot of illegal taking going on down there.”

For the past two years, state wildlife officials have heavily promoted the paddlefishing and the agency’s new processing center where caviar is made from female paddlefish eggs.

State wildlife officials clean an angler’s fish for free in exchange for the eggs. The eggs are processed into caviar and sold to a wholesaler, and the money earned goes back into paddlefish management.

Gordon said the new rules will result in less paddlefish being caught and less caviar being available to sell.

"We are willing to sacrifice that, the caviar, for the betterment of the population,” he said.