1. Convert cropping systems to conservation tillage. Research shows that no-till farming outperforms conventional tillage in both winter and summer for quail habitat.
2. Thin dense forests to allow sunlight to reach the ground. Sunlight drives quail habitat, while closed canopy forests create poor habitat and provide an ideal environment for avian predators. Thin to allow 50% of the ground to be hit by sunlight at midday.
3. If thinning isn't feasible for an entire tract of timber, consider thinning that will open the canopy for 50 to 100 feet before getting into dense woods. The main idea is to eliminate hard edge, the abrupt change from crops to dense woods.
4. To get a diversity of plants in woods, use prescribed burning on a rotational basis every year or every four years or in a checkerboard pattern. Avoid burning entire tracts of land the same year. Partridge pea and lespedeza are among the plants that germinate after fire and that benefit quail.
5. Park the Bush Hog and the disk harrow during the April-to-September nesting season. Allow weeds to grow during the warm months, then disk later during the winter. In the corners of center-pivot-irrigated fields, manage by disking rather than mowing.
6. Create brood habitat that produces large numbers of insects young chicks need. This can be done with annual weeds such as ragweed. Simply disk the land during the winter, and on most Southern farms ragweed will come up naturally.
7. Create quail habitat within the interior of crop fields. Use areas that are low yielding, such as eroded sites and clay galls. Or leave fallow strips every 300 to 400 feet in the middles of fields.
8. Move field roads out into fields and away from the borders or edges. This allows the borders to be managed for quail habitat.
9. Where feasible, eliminate thick stands of bahiagrass, bermudagrass and fescue. Keep in mind, however, that these grasses remain among the best plants for controlling erosion in grassed waterways.
10. When using pesticides, select those that are low in toxicity. Most widely used pesticides are relatively nontoxic to bobwhite quail and their young.