For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  I do not delude myself: my motives for providing bobwhite quail with food and cover are self-serving because for three months each fall and winter I shoot and eat them. It also happens that when hunting season arrives I think of them as my birds, to be shared with whom I choose, when I choose. That is not at all in keeping with how I felt as a young man growing up in southern Florida where, as a part-time poacher, I was not only irreverent of posted signs but firmly believed that land belonged to everyone; I took pleasure in hunting game others claimed as theirs. Those were the sweaty, muddy days of hunting private land, of outfoxing foremen, and of making myself and my dog small under the palmetto bush while the Fish and Game helicopter hung overhead, tempting, like a decoying duck. It was also a decade to be young, a time of hard-ons and loud laughter, of middle fingers permanently raised at the establishment, in pursuit of everything except wisdom at a time when there were half as many people in the world. In the book of Daniel it says “They shall drive you [King Nebuchadnezzar] from among men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field.” To be drenched in the dew of heaven and to grow the feathers of eagles sounds like a pretty good place to be driven to these days, given the alternatives.

  Thirty years later, the positions are reversed. I invite the game wardens to sit and wait on my land until someone is stupid enough to shoot at the plastic white-tailed deer decoy, complete with glowing red eyes, planted in the open field across the county road from the farm. One man got caught twice in so many years. He paid his fine, lost his rifle, and six months later shot the same piece of plastic, in the same place, with a different gun and said “Durn!” when they cuffed him. I’m betting that he’ll be back.

  V

  By the middle of January in Tallahassee, when the natural and planted food is turning into compost, I supplement my quails’ diet with cracked corn or milo—milo is cheaper and doesn’t sour as quickly—in twenty or so feeders set in good cover throughout the farm. This feeds the cotton rats, as well as adding fat to my birds’ diminishing body weights. If nighttime temperatures drop below freezing for more than a few days, I broadcast grain from an electric spreader on the tailgate of the truck in those places I have seen or heard coveys, or where I have shot birds that feel light in the hand. Many of the plantations rotate food on the courses they are going to hunt, accomplishing both an additional source of energy and a concentration of birds for the dogs to find. This path of life and death is known as the honey trail. One might argue the morality behind drawing birds to food to better shoot them, but such has been the custom since man baited hooks and hurled spears. On the other hand, if one thinks of sport as carrying certain moral obligation, or the evolution of man’s principles, the ethicality of the honey trail is debatable.

  There is no question in my mind that the most valuable work being performed in wildlife management today involves telemetry, a relatively new science, expensive because it requires a substantial investment in man-hours but so diversified in its applications that transmitters have been implanted in species ranging from rattlesnakes to adulterers.

  Bobwhite quail have been, and still are, one of the most studied game birds in the world, and now that the logistics of making and attaching transmitters is perfected, the data that are being gathered establish habitat use, feeding patterns, and mortality due to weather, illness, and predation, including the gun. Telemetry is also in the process of disavowing many of the allegations about bobwhite quail we all grew up with.

  “There is no such thing as an unproductive point,” says Ted Devoes, an open-faced, sunburned young man working toward his doctorate in game management from Auburn University on a three-year quail project at Pinneland Plantation south of Albany, Georgia. In his first season he outfitted 140 quail with transmitters and banded an additional 350. I hunted Pinneland with its owner, Prosser Mellon, for two days late in the winter of 1993, escorted by a mounted retinue of scientists wearing earphones and carrying radar antennae. Others rode along while musing over biological matters and offering their expertise in all aspects of the piney woods from turkey hunting to stressed-out pine plantations. We hunters went on about the business of hunting as if the entourage weren’t there. Devoes and his assistant had been monitoring quail in four one-thousand-acre tracts for a year, banding birds at night, following specific coveys in every conceivable weather, retrieving the remains of dead birds, and, from the markings and scratches on the plastic-coated transmitters, identifying the varied causes of death. A little like a U.N. delegation, Ted and his helper had monitored every hunt on the assigned tracts since the beginning of the season and knew the whereabouts of every single bobwhite quail. We nimrods didn’t know dick, except when the dogs pointed.

  The first afternoon we moved eighteen coveys. An incredible number under any circumstances, made more incredible because this was the final week of the hunting season, and even more surprising because the last time I had shot at Pinneland (two years earlier) the plantation was averaging thirteen coveys a day. I learned that of the three factors that had made a difference, one was achieved through management, one by Prosser Mellon, and one by God. In the first place, the woods had been seriously opened to the sun, twice as many food plots had been sown into the habitat, and the serious figure of two million new bicolor Lespedeza seedlings over ten thousand acres had been planted. Secondly, Prosser Mellon, a quiet man who hides a wry sense of humor behind a somewhat convenient hearing disorder, had finally discouraged his British-born game hog of a stepfather from inviting his murdering cronies by enhancing their daily libations with enough Ex-Lax to make the old boys yearn for the comfort of their men’s club in London. Prosser’s bold administration effectively cut the hunting days on Pinneland by a half. Thirdly, the 1992-1993 breeding season had been graced with the perfect amount of summer rains and an unusual percentage of late hatches. There were birds everywhere, sometimes as many as three coveys in the air at one time.

  The year-end statistics demonstrated the following: Fifteen percent of the hens raised two broods, presumably leaving the cock bird with the chore of raising the first hatch to adulthood. This information alone disclaims previous belief that hens only renest if disturbed or after losing eggs of young ones to weather or predation. It appears that on Pinneland, anyway, such is not the case; when during the evening report I suggested that perhaps Mellon raised sexually deviant quail, I was told to shut up.

  Bobwhites are territorial and studies on birds outfitted with transmitters the size of fingernails confirm that individual coveys claim specific real estate. Devoes, who is also a bird hunter, advances a somewhat tongue-in-cheek example of the reluctance of quail to fly out of their home range. He theorizes that the covey a hunter flushes and observes making a right-angle turn at the limits of his vision is not attempting an escape maneuver as much as it is trying to remain inside the boundary of its territory, a territory the covey is intimately familiar with, from its gopher holes to its severed treetops.

  It was also established that on any given day of the hunting season the Pinneland bird dogs—and these are very good dogs—find 30 percent of the available coveys. Of those coveys pointed but not shot, 41 percent wild-flushed and 59 percent ran. The latter figure is higher than anyone ever dreamed, particularly since it occurred in good piney cover. From that statistic came Ted Devoes’ statement “There is no such thing as an unproductive point.” A good dog points the scent of a covey; what that covey does in terms of running away does not diminish the dog’s original contact.

  Prosser and I are pretty quick getting off our horse and honoring a point (he is also an exceptional shot). We walk quickly to either side of the dogs and keep moving until the birds get up. That is as it should be when quail hunting, but twice that afternoon we followed dogs pointing and relocating coveys for hundreds of yards before birds began getting up. It would seem that these princely little American birds have over the years genetically adapted themselves to become the roadrunners of the East.

  When we were uns
uccessful in flushing a pointed covey and the dogs had been sent off to find a new one, my curiosity would get the better of me and I would ask Devoes where the birds had been. Sometimes he would point to a food patch a quarter of a mile away; other times he would grin and point to a shrub sixty feet from where we had hunted. Ted knew more than the dogs, the handlers, and the shooters. He was a black belt in twenty-first-century electronic wildlife research.

  However the main problem with research on these beautiful Southern plantations—telemetric or otherwise—is that these are mollycoddled birds. While a percentage of the data is valid, quail that live on public hunting grounds or on unmanaged private property are not going to enjoy the benefits, health-wise or otherwise, that these blue-blooded birds do, and while most plantation owners are careful not to overshoot a course or shoot down a covey, such is not the case on public hunting grounds. One could argue then that Buckner’s theory on quail losses in early hatches would not hold up if 15 percent of the females raised two broods. But I prefer to believe, until the data prove me wrong, that just as with humans, pampered quail eating the equivalent of caviar for breakfast are going to behave like wealthy women and divorce accordingly.

  One of the most extensive studies on poor man’s quail was made on the 150,000-acre base at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where the soil is rank and the hunting pressure heavy. The harvest of bobwhite quail went from approximately 8,000 birds a year in 1970 to 650 in 1985. The seven-year telemetry study indicated the following: A 60 percent raptor-kill in late winter for lack of cover, continuous dispersal of the coveys by hunters, who took an additional 20 percent of the birds, and a mammalian predation rate of 20 percent; quail survival rates averaged 6 percent over four years at Fort Bragg as opposed to 25 percent at Tall Timber Research Station near Tallahassee, where the birds are well cared for. The food plots at Fort Bragg had been planted haphazardly, with little or no escape cover, inviting all sorts of predators, including hunters, to a concentration of targets with nowhere to go. Late-winter hunting had the effect of diminishing the breeding stock, both through direct harvest of birds that had survived the winter as well as by scattering bobwhites at the peak of the accipiter conventions. This study reinforces the feeling that we are no longer dealing with a compensatory harvest—killing birds that would have died anyway—but an additive harvest: a harvest of birds that might otherwise have survived to reproduce, particularly when numbers are down and the cover is poor.

  The recommendations that have surfaced from the various telemetry studies being held across the country are: One, that no more than one-third of a covey should be shot, including cripples. Two, that food plots should be located as close to cover as possible. Three, that the hunting season should be shortened (particularly in the South) so that it doesn’t dovetail into a migration of talons. And four, that one should avoid shooting coveys just before dark, as they won’t have time to regroup and will spend a long and vulnerable night pursued by living nightmares shaped like owls and foxes.

  Forget the studies made in Texas—unless you are from that state—because management is secondary to rain. Droughts are always destructive to the feathered race, and that applies in the Lone Star State; on the other hand the right amount of rain in southern Texas spells more quail per acre than all the rest of the states added together.

  It is theorized, through observation at Fort Bragg, that hawks respond to gunfire in a Pavlovian manner and fly to the sound looking for an easy meal. Telemetry has also proven that about half the hunted bob white quail run for dear life on or about the third time they hear the bells or electronic beepers worn by bird dogs, not to mention the cavalry of horses, mule-pulled wagons, and general jibber-jabber. Poachers have moved silently through the woods for centuries for a reason, and birds hear as well as game wardens, probably better.

  VI

  When it comes to cooking the game the French and Italians have so little left of, they are the masters. Growing up in a village in Normandy, I ate wild animals in the homes of farmers, plumbers, carpenters, grocery-store owners, the bourgeois, and off Sevres-ware from castles whose owners invited me, once in a while, to shoot driven birds.

  Game was habitually served once or twice a week during the five-month-long French hunting season, and from those thousands of homes—in which birds and boar and rabbits were roasted, braised, and fried—emerged over the centuries a deep appreciation for and understanding of the taste of animals that live in the wild, of forest fragrances, and an innumerable number of recipes with which to cook them. One can only wish that the French and Italians hadn’t been such pigs when it came to the slaughter of what they excel at preparing. The fact that game is generally poorly cooked in the United States and that the majority of the population doesn’t have a taste for it is, with hindsight, a godsend.

  A la pointe du fusil means at the tip of the gun, and implies freshly killed game. Faisandé means pheasanted (if that were a word) and suggests game that is hung until the germs of its intestines invade the balance of its tissues, decomposing and softening them while strengthening the fundamental taste of the meat, which in the case of pheasants, wild turkey, and quail is bland. Three days on the gallows will relax muscles and fibers as surely as the sun loosens the reserve of young women, allowing the wild flavor of its nature and the environment it lived in to be released.

  I hang birds, in the case of ungutted quail, for three days (longer for drawn birds) in the bottom third of a refrigerator or, weather permitting, on a breezy porch. If, after that time, the quail are not eaten, I freeze them in full feathers in a zip-lock plastic bag designed for other things. When the bird is thawed, the feathers pluck effortlessly and the innards surface in a tight, hard ball, ready for the disposal. The drawback to this method of freezing is that one loses the use of the bird’s liver, which after dangling in mid-stomach for three days has matured beyond consumption; the heart and gizzard are fine and should be used in the stock or stuffing for added taste. Brillat-Savarin, author of The Physiology of Taste, wrote that “game likes to be waited on like a pension from the government to a man of letters who never learned how to flatter.” I once ate a mallard duck that had been hung for seventeen days. Taking things too far used to be a habit of mine; in that particular case, a bad one.

  Hanging quail drawn or undrawn is matter of preference. I opt for the latter, so long as the bird isn’t gut-shot—a gamble that leaves me open to no less odorous surprises, in these abysmal days of infected pursuits, as any other grail, confirming my fears that the past held more promise than the present. Medically speaking, hung meat carries its asides, gout being one of them. But then, there are so many things one shouldn’t do, for the same explicit closeness of quarters, that as long as one is fully prepared for a surprise, why not indulge a little?

  The sooner a freshly killed quail is introduced to the skillet or the oven, the better. The bird’s bruised flesh must not be allowed to gather itself around tendons and bones because, short of a slow rewarming of the muscles inside of which the bird’s flavor is in retreat, the quail will be almost tasteless.

  Bobwhite can be delicious slow-cooked, depending on what puddle of liquid they are cooked in. If it is a can of noodle soup, the birds might as well be pen-raised; both flavors deserve each other. On the other hand, I have braised quail next to shallots, small carrots, duck thighs, peaches, reduced veal stock, and port, and the dish was so good I took risks and licked the casserole before sending it to the bottom of the sink. I have also cooked quail in white wine on a bed of seedless grapes and wild green onion, atop a slice of bread. I have poached them in gumbo seconds ahead of the shrimp, and substituted them for gray partridge in the famous Perdrix au choux, substituting collard greens for the cabbage and adding balsamic pepper vinegar before serving. These dishes take twenty-five minutes of cooking in low, wet heat instead of twelve minutes in a hot oven.

  However, given my druthers I pick my quail, brown them in a skillet with butter (which also plumps them up nicely), and
roast them quickly at high heat. Skinning birds (unless there is not enough left to deal with) is an insult to one’s palate as well as to the bird whose life one has terminated. I view skinning birds with the same critical eye I reserve for those who cook their meals inside plastic pouches—a desolate habit of those who can only be described as the premature ejaculators of the culinary nineties.

  If one cuts the wings off a quail it becomes a candidate for rolling on the grill. Quail are built to roll, and as long as they are basted and tended to, they are exquisite this way. In the South the tendency is to split the birds up the backbone and flatten them so they look like bats. In either case, the leeway for making mistakes on the grill is minimal. The hot cooking surface draws the moisture from the bird, so when the quail is ready a prompt sitting of the guests at the table is mandatory; three minutes on the wrong side of perfect and the birds are fit for playing Ping-Pong, but not for eating.