Missouri Department of Conservation

Building a Bobwhite Factory

An engineer’s methodical mindset and his passion for conservation meld into a plantation for quail.

Jeff Churan didn’t know everything about quail management when he set out to turn his Livingston County farm into a quail factory. He still doesn’t. But he is accumulating enough knowledge to draw up a pretty good blueprint for bobwhite success.

Churan is passionate about conservation. He served on the citizens’ committee that secured voter approval of Missouri’s one-eighth of 1 percent Design for Conservation sales tax in 1976. He was a Conservation Commissioner from 1983 through 1989.

Two trips to a Southern quail plantation launched his quest for bobwhite restoration. In 1988 he traveled to the Talokas Plantation near Thomasville, Ga., where he and his companions were thrilled to flush 10 coveys of quail in a day of hunting. A decade later, he returned and flushed 25 coveys.

Talokas had switched from stocking pen-reared birds to managing land exclusively for wild bobwhites. That got Churan wondering if he could achieve similar results on The Cedars Plantation, his family’s farm near Avalon, Mo.

An engineer by profession, Churan is nothing if not methodical. His approach to quail management might be described as tenacious or even obsessive. He set out to turn his 320 acres, plus 40 adjacent acres “borrowed” from neighbors, into ideal quail habitat. The only constraint on his ambitious goal of producing one quail per acre was the same one facing most landowners.

“I have to make the mortgage payment,” says Churan. “Income from the land does that and more. I take what is left and put as much as possible back into management.”

The first thing Churan did was draw a grid over an aerial photo of his farm, dividing it into 10-acre plots. Then he set out to ensure that everything quail need to thrive was available in every plot.

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Building a Bobwhite Factory, page 2

Creating 36 self-sufficient quail mini-habitats took extremely careful planning and lots of labor. Churan and his family have done much of the work themselves. For other tasks, they have relied on a contract farmer.

To ensure that he could show the contract farmer exactly what he had in mind, Churan went back to his aerial map. He created overlays illustrating every management variable—the land’s physical contours and soil types, field boundaries, crop rotations, grass fields and burn plans, food plots, woody cover and more.

Churan used several techniques to break large crop fields and pastures into smaller units and create mini-habitats. He embedded food plots within grassland on the flat upper parts of rolling hills. He also broke up large fields with plantings of gray and silky dogwood, wild plum, blackberry, fragrant sumac, shrub lespedeza and other woody plants. This created miles of high-energy food sources along the edges of quality quail cover. It also helped confine high-impact farming practices to the least erodible areas.

“We planted more than 25,000 trees and shrubs using the pull-behind planter that the Conservation Department loans out to landowners,” says Churan. “We got pretty good at it. If there was a contest to see who could plant the most trees with that piece of equipment, I think we could win it.”

One early innovation at The Cedars was surrounding crop fields with strips of grass at least 50 feet wide. Besides creating cover for quail near food sources, this practice prevents erosion from cropped areas.

“This was the precursor of Conservation Practice 33 under the Conservation Reserve Program,” says Churan. “Some of our other practices, such as lightly disking pastures, anticipated the mid-contract grassland management provisions that eventually became part of CRP.”

Churan has taken a strong interest in developing grassland management strategies that benefit quail. Most of the land at The Cedars that once was fescue pasture now features a mix of warm-season grasses, such as bluestems and Indian grass, plus clover and other legumes. He has his warm-season grass fields on a three-year burn rotation to keep the stands open enough for quail to use, and he lightly disks half of the fields that he burns each year.

“We learned that there is grass, and there is grass,” says Churan. “Quail thrive where there is a diverse mix of habitat types. Our burning and disking arrangement creates six different stages of grass succession. We saw a big jump in quail numbers when we implemented our burn plan.”

Although he believes in the benefit of intensively managed native, warm-season grasses, Churan also recognizes that fescue, an imported, cool-season grass, plays an important role on many farms. So he kept two patches of fescue on his own land where he could experiment with making it more quail-friendly.

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Building a Bobwhite Factory, page 3

“Fescue actually provides excellent foraging for insects—a high-protein food that quail chicks need—when it is mixed with other plants,” he says. “Light disking on our fescue fields has produced a surprisingly good growth of native weeds, such as ragweed, whose seeds are a favorite quail food.”

In the other fescue field, Churan planted shrub lespedeza and blackberries. The thorny vines have thrived, forming thickets in a draw that often holds a covey of quail.

“Of all the plantings we have done for quail habitat, this has come closest to producing covey headquarters-quality habitat,” says Churan.

His dedication to quail management and his meticulous documentation of every facet of his practical experiments won Churan the 2006 Adopt-A-Covey Award from Quail Unlimited. The resulting cover story in Quail Unlimited Magazine fits perfectly with his commitment to sharing what he learns with other quail enthusiasts. Conservationist readers can find his complete quail management plan and progress report at www.MissouriConservation.org/16115.

Churan recognizes that not everyone will tackle quail management as aggressively as he and his family have.

“You would have to be nuts to go at it the way we do,” he admits. “We do this stuff almost every weekend. But anyone with an interest in quail management can make a difference using the techniques we are developing.”

Although effective quail management is within the grasp of any landowner, Churan says it does require continuing work. “You can’t just write up a plan, cut a few trees and plant some shrubs,” he says. “Quail habitat is dynamic. You have to keep after it.”

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Building a Bobwhite Factory, page 4

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