Portions of this story originally appeared in the Tall Timbers Quail Management Handbook and the Red Hills Forest Stewardship Guide
It is not possible to produce maximum pine timber revenue and maintain maximum bobwhite production on every acre. Finding a balance between the two requires scaling down expectations.
If the goal is to balance timber, quail, other wildlife and aesthetics, it is worth knowing that there are trade-offs for mixing management strategies.
The reality is that it is not cheap to implement the intensive management required to sustain high density quail populations. Not only are there direct management costs, but also opportunity cost of lower timber revenue. However, moderate quail density can be maintained with less inputs and with more timber income. Individual landowners will need to decide what their goals are.
Many landowners turn to timber production to at least partially offset costs but it is up to them and their managers to determine how much timber they are willing to sacrifice to maintain the desired quail density.
We’ll set out to provide tips on balancing pine timber production – measured in square feet per acre or basal area – and bobwhite and discuss where tradeoffs might occur depending on your management objectives. There may be variations in practice and management strategy depending on your location or tree species.
Finding the balance
Bobwhite are a shrubland species, so there isn’t a minimum square feet per acre tree distribution that they won’t thrive in in the Southeast. In other words, they don’t need the trees at all. However having some trees can make it easier to burn as they provide fuel from needles. Also, shade from trees slows down plant succession, which may be desirable on some sites. Pine also provide some food during pine masting years.
While bobwhite do not need trees, there is a maximum pine canopy coverage that they begin to avoid and a minimum canopy coverage that begins to impact the ability to manage the ecosystem using a key tool, prescribed fire.
Therein lies the issue for landowners and managers who are looking to grow and harvest timber while also maintaining bobwhite.
To find the sweet spot of simultaneously managing for timber and quail, the main factor to address is basal area of a stand.
Basal area is the average amount of a given area, usually an acre, occupied by tree stems, usually expressed as square feet per acre. The appropriate basal area in a timber stand depends on landowner objectives.
Individual stands can be shaped through commercial harvesting or noncommercial thinning so that mature stands are in the basal area range between 40 and 100 square feet per acre. Typically, higher basal area in longleaf stands can support bobwhite because they allow more light to reach the ground and have different prescribed fire intensities than thicker loblolly stands.
Loblolly stands above 60 square feet per acre will hold very few bobwhite.
That 40-100 square feet per acre range provides sunlight to the ground to maintain the herbaceous understory community, which deteriorates rapidly above 100 square feet per acre, and generally provides habitat for quail.
While the potential for income from forest products begins to decline below 60 square feet per acre, this is at the upper end of the optimal range for quail management, which ranges between 40 and 60 square feet per acre.
Above 100 square feet per acre, especially in loblolly stands, bobwhite habitat is usually absent in the understory due to excessive shading from the pine. Below 40 square feet per acre, potential for steady income from forest products is severely compromised.
Thinning stands too low can also hinder the ability to use prescribed fire as a management tool.
In stands with a basal area below 20, there is a decrease of the steady needle cast from pine trees needed to carry prescribed fire consistently. Fire is a cost-effective way to manage pine-grasslands for bobwhite and timber. Maintaining an overstory that provides needles will ensure fine fuels that broaden the window for fire use.
Because of the long growing season in the South, grass retains a lot of moisture for much of the year, meaning there are just a few months of the year to get complete burns without pine needles for fuels.
Additionally, stands with a basal area below 20 are more susceptible to lightning strikes and wind damage since each tree lost moves the stand to a more open condition. Also, low basal area does allow for natural regeneration through seedling recruitment, a necessary process to continually replace harvested trees without planting. This is strongly influenced by the species of pine. It is difficult to naturally regenerate loblolly in a frequently burned stand.
Another trade-off is balancing regeneration with the desire for maximum bobwhite habitat and maximum hunting opportunity. Regeneration is essential to perpetuate the overstory. The trade-off comes when provisions are not made for adequate regeneration and the overstory begins to age and break down.
As the overstory thins, the benefits of partial shade will decrease and the cost of quail management will increase. Potential revenue from timber to offset quail management costs also will be lost.
As pines age, at some point they need to be allowed to move through the midstory and into the overstory.
Some landowners favor management toward uneven aged stands because of both the beauty and the financial incentives available for that type of management that mimics what pine forests historically looked like. In some cases, this means converting planted pine stands to more uneven aged stands through random planting of appropriate species for the site and by thinning selectively (group or individual tree selection) rather than thinning entire rows of trees.
Variety in stand management strategies across a property can help provide a steady income stream and reduce the risk of tree mortality.
And while this might produce less wood volume, with incentive payments, cost share, high value end products, this can be comparable to maximum wood volume, depending on market conditions.
Quail habitat starts in the canopy
The important factor for supporting bobwhite populations is maintaining groundcover structure that includes low growing woody vegetation, forbs, grasses, and bare ground that provide for the year-round needs of bobwhite.
Maintaining groundcover often starts with the decision on how to manage the timber overstory as described above. The overstory can provide some habitat in the form of food resources (pine mast, acorns, etc.), but its largest effect is how it influences the groundcover.
The particular species of groundcover plants isn’t as important as the overall structure and the management to maintain them. None of them are useful if they are not managed through periodic application of prescribed fire or mechanical disturbance to provide adequate bare ground for quail to move, feed, and escape predation. They must also provide adequate overhead cover for concealment from predators. Under these conditions, quail can thrive across a wide range of soil and vegetation types —longleaf, loblolly, shortleaf, hardwood savannah, farmland, and rangeland
The economics of it all
Timber production is often tapped as a way to pay for the cost to manage land for bobwhite.
While the economics vary depending on the site and region, intensive timber management on as little as 200 acres out of 5,000 acres can off-set quail management costs.
Management costs for quail increase dramatically below a basal area of 20 square feet per acre of mature trees.
The option of setting aside a few high productivity sites dedicated to maximizing timber revenue should be considered. But it’s only one approach. Another approach is to constantly thin intermediate or midstory trees or selectively thin dominant canopy trees.
Quail and pine trees go hand in hand but it is nearly impossible to maximize both across an entire property. The key takeaway is that there are trade-offs for focusing on managing one over the other that need to be carefully considered by each land owner and land manager.
