Quail Hunting's New Good Old Days, Part I

Bobwhite restoration success and fresh hope in the South

That's 20 coveys you've moved in three hours, gentlemen." Plantation manager Joe Harvey tipped his red cap, and then whoaed his horse beside us. "Not a bad afternoon. You shot into 13 coveys, and seven flushed wild." In the shade of a sprawling live oak, my father and I surveyed our surroundings from a bench-seat perch atop a mule-drawn wagon. As far as the eye carried was a softly rolling landscape, gentle hills swelling and falling like the ocean on a calm summer morning. From it rose longleaf pines, straight and tall like the masts of a clipper, and here and there were lone live oaks draped in Spanish moss, seeming to guard the forest like ancient bearded sentinels.

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