Above: Tall Timbers Game Bird Research Biologist Michael Hazelbaker tracks quail in the snow in January 2025. Researchers did not document an abnormal drop in survival due to winter weather in the region.
The winter of 2024-2025 has been unusually cold for much of the southeastern U.S.
This has prompted many land managers to wonder about the effects on bobwhite populations. Of course, bobwhite occur far outside the typically warm south, ranging west to New Mexico and as far north as the Midwest and MidAtlantic.
These areas of the country have fairly frequent snow and ice with prolonged cold. Clearly bobwhite have a remarkable ability to persist despite extreme weather to exist in these places. However, winter weather can affect survival, sometimes dramatically, and populations at the northern edge of bobwhite distribution are known to be limited by cold.
When temperatures drop, it affects bobwhite in several ways. First, birds use more calories to stay warm, which means they need more food. Activity often increases as they need to forage longer, and they may venture further from protective shrub cover. This can put them in higher risk of predation as they are moving and exposed to the careful eyes of raptors.
Supplemental feeding both before and after snowfall can help ensure quail have abundant, accessible food.
Snow and ice can make food unavailable as it covered up. Bobwhite now have to scratch down through the snow to access food. This is inefficient and causes them to use more calories. If the snow is too deep or iced over, they may not be able to access some food at all.
Also, deep snow is difficult for bobwhite to move through. Often immediately after snowfall, they limit movement and stay buried in deep cover where snow is not as deep and they have good thermal and screening cover. They try to conserve energy waiting for conditions to improve. But at some point, they must move and feed or they will burn through all their stored fat reserves.
There are several things that a land manager can do to give bobwhite an edge against winter weather.
First, provide good protective cover that is well distributed across the property. Burning only a portion of the property each year and keeping the overstory canopy thinned will help develop this critical layer of shrubs and vines.
Plum thickets, tall blackberry patches, tangles of grape vines, and dense live oak resprouts can all serve as excellent cover. Bobwhite may also use atypical cover such as blowdowns, cane thickets, and small cedar after heavy snow.
Food needs to be abundant and easily accessible. Various legume seeds, ragweed seed, and small acorns are used heavily during cold weather. Grain crops such as sorghum are also relished. If you have a bobwhite feeding program you should consider feeding heavily both before the storm and afterwards if it persists. Make sure you are distributing the grain broadly into cover and not using stationary feeders which concentrate bobwhite and their predators.
While a land manager cannot control the weather, they can absolutely mitigate for it. The steps you take throughout the year may determine how dramatically winter weather affects bobwhite and other wildlife.
While the typical southeastern property may only have a few days of extreme cold or snow each year, it should be considered in your management plans all year. This includes managing cover, food, and predators. The more robust the bobwhite population and the better the habitat conditions present, the less of an affect winter storms will have.
