Listen soon for the bobwhite in Buckhead
Northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus)
Special Georgia status: official state game bird because of popularity with hunters.
Size and shape: small quail with rounded body, small head, rounded wings, short tail.
Color pattern: intricately patterned in brown, rufous, buff and black. Males have bold black-and-white head pattern. Females have a buffy throat and eyebrow.
Behavior: travel in coveys and run across the ground from the shelter of one shrubby patch to another. When flushed, they explode into flight with quick wingbeats and then duck into nearest cover.
Habitat: open pine forests, overgrown fields, shrubby areas and grasslands
Nesting: in a shallow depression on ground, concealed by surrounding vegetation or a woven, partial dome; female lays 12-16 pale buff eggs; incubation 22-24 days.
Voice: Male emits a rising, whistled call that sounds like bob-WHITE; sometimes a three-note call sounds like ah, bob white.
Diet: seasonally available seeds, berries, leaves, roots and nuts; also eats insects and other invertebrates.
Sources: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Birds of Georgia
A 10-acre swath of open woods and meadow at the Atlanta History Center in the heart of Buckhead may bring back a once-common sound that has been missing for decades in the metro area — the call of the northern bobwhite quail.
Last month, the folks at the history center, with help from Atlanta Audubon, released 20 pen-raised bobwhites into the tract of open piedmont forest and grassland within the center’s Swan Woods.
Bobwhites thrive in such habitat, and the center’s goal is to establish a wild breeding population of the plump, charismatic little birds.
It also will be in keeping with the history of the South, where the bobwhite once was as common as cotton fields, and highly popular with hunters. Its whistled, two note (sometimes three-note) call was one of the region’s most distinctive sounds.
But Georgia’s quail population has plunged by more than 85 per cent since the 1960s — due primarily to rapid development that has chewed up farmlands, open woodlands, brushy fields, grasslands and other habitat that bobwhites prefer.
In metro Atlanta, Christmas Bird Counts decades ago turned up bobwhites in abundance in the region. Today, seeing or hearing a quail during a bird count in the metro area is cause for celebration.
“It will be nice to hear bobwhites calling in Atlanta,” said Sarah Roberts, director of living collections at the history center.
A few years ago, she noted, the tract in Swan Woods on the 33-acre Atlanta History Center campus was an overgrown swath where English ivy and other non-native invasive plants ran rampant. When the center’s officials decided to locate the historic Wood family log cabin there, an intensive effort cleared the tract of invasives and made it an open woodland, with a wildflower meadow where only plants native to Georgia’s Piedmont region now grow.
A goal, Roberts said, is to make it representative of what a piedmont forest looked like centuries ago — complete with bobwhite quail.
In the sky: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: The moon is in the first quarter. The only visible planets are Mars, rising out of the east at sunset; Jupiter, high in the southwest at dusk and appearing near the moon Saturday night; and Saturn, high in the east just after dark.
