The unexpected whistle of a bobwhite quail on his family’s land more than a decade ago has prompted David Kidd to shape his small properties in the Georgia Piedmont region into a haven for wildlife.
Situated just outside Athens, the two parcels where Kidd lives with his wife encompass just over 500 acres. The family properties started out as a place to continue managing for deer and turkey, but in the first year he was there, Kidd heard bobwhite quail whistling.
“The way this place looked, you would have thought, like, why in the world would there be quail?” Kidd said. “Then the next year, there weren’t any. Then, for a while, there wasn’t any. And then for a good while there weren’t any.”
Since then, Kidd has worked on improving his property’s open savannah. One parcel was a thicket of privet mixed into mature loblolly pine trees. The other was thick with pine timber, leaving little room for sunlight to reach the forest floor.
He brought in a forestry mulcher to clear out brush and invested in discing brood fields to promote forbs such as ragweed. Just two years into living on and working the property, he clear cut the mature loblolly pines and planted 125 acres of longleaf pine seedlings, now about 12 years old. That has allowed him to use more and more prescribed fire at regular intervals.
“This was a mess, but fire has brought it back,” he said. “Now I’m getting fuel from the longleaf themselves on this patch and you see I have nice forbs response in here as well as grass response. So now, there’s no problem carrying fire. In those first few years. It was tough. It was a fight.”
Those fallow fields harbored a brood covey last year and, the more work he’s put into creating quality habitat, the more he’s heard bobwhite whistling on the property.
Kidd grew up in the region watching his father and grandfather hunt quail and in fact didn’t start seriously hunting at all until he was in his 20s. At some point, the quail went away in Northeast Georgia.
But when he heard that first quail, he began to study the science of what quail need, and consulted with Tall Timbers biologists Kyle Magdziuk and Paul Grimes on how to better manage his property.
He plotted out how to change his local landscape in the hopes of seeing bobwhite again and benefitting other wildlife at the same time.
“I decided, I may never have a huntable population, but if I can get quail reestablished on this property my deer and turkey are fine. Everything will benefit.”
Kidd burned his other tract just down the road the day before in Mid-April. The rows of pine trees in the area had been thinned by a logging crew last summer and Hurricane Helene cleared out even more pines and the understory has responded well.
He said as he and his crew were mopping up the prescribed fire, quail were whistling in the charred woods down the hill. To him, its an indicator that the work he’s put in is working.
“It’s like they were whistling, saying, ‘There’s smoke in the air down here. This is going to be good this summer,’” he said.
In addition to thinning trees, discing and implementing more and more prescribed fire, Kidd has started trapping predators recently. While he likes seeing so many different species on this land, he recognized the need to manage the growing population of nest predators.
“I really do feel like that the more balanced the landscape, the environment, that there’s room for everything out here,” he said. “But I do think sometimes it can get skewed one way or another, and you just have to take action.”
Kidd’s property is small, but he remembers attending a Tall Timbers Field Day in South Carolina years back where the discussion turned to focusing more and more on helping smaller property owners figure out how to manage their land.
His property is broken down into burn units only about 10 to 12 acres in size using roads and creeks as fire breaks, he’s focused on maximizing areas for brooding cover and thinned down trees to a basal area between 40 and 100 square feet per acre, which seems to be attracting quail.
While Kidd has worked to improve his land, his use of prescribed fire is spreading to neighboring properties. Others who have never considered fire are starting to use it to manage their land and build landscape scale change that can support wildlife across property boundaries and overall improve the local ecosystem.
It’s that continued improvement built upon sweat equity, and increase in quail he’s hearing off his back porch, that makes the land management journey that much sweeter.
“You see that response and it just keeps you going,” he said. “It just shows me I’m doing the right thing.”
