Quail harvest declared after SSAA research

The survey, recording over 16,000 sightings meant hope was restored for a game hunting season on quail after one had not been declared in the past two years.

The declared quail season will run from 30 April to 31 July with 20 quail per hunter per day.

Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia program leader of wildlife programs Matt Godson said the last time any real statistical work was done on quail was back in the 70's early 80's by the CSIRO.

"There has been a lack of scientific interest since then, the only people that have shown interest in trying to cover any gaps in knowledge has been hunters themselves," he said.

"Back in 2011 to 2014, I undertook a quail research project which involved looking at sex and age ratios of the harvest birds during the quail season and from there we could sort of gauge the productivity of their breeding by seeing what the age classes within the harvested birds were.

"Really the only ones who have shown any interest into the quail are hunters."

Mr Godson said the main reason for the lack of interest in quail was because they were not a "sexy species".

"They were not either endangered or a pest and that was normally where you would look at the wildlife paradigm," he said.

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"You have got all these animals towards being extinct so the government has put money into that then on the other side you've got you've got pest animals that are highly abundant and causing issues to landholders, farmers and also the environment that also gets funding."

"So all these species in the middle, there is rarely any attention on them.

"But when you look at game species like ducks and quail, hunters actually have an invested interest in maintaining the species and finding out information about them."

Mr Godson said quail can be helpful on agricultural properties because as they are developing, their diet is normally more based on insects.

"Quail potentially can eat insects in crop lands so then there is a less need for farmers to have to spray but in modern agriculture where the systems are built to yield higher - do quail provide a benefit to farmers, it would be a very interesting question to explore," he says.

Mr Godson said there was 16,024 quails counted in the sample area covering 8,333 hectares of a mixture of canola, lentils, barley, wheat and hay crops.

"In SA we have got quail available habitat of around 70 million ha so what we did with this study was to try and work out an average state wide density of quail per ha which was about 1.35 quail," he said.

"From looking at that density across a number of agricultural regions, we were able to project a quail population of somewhere between 6.2 and 17.8M birds.

"The purposes of this study was to show the department and especially the minister that quail are highly abundant and a sustainable quail harvest through hunting wouldn't be an issue.

"Because if you have a population between 6.2M and 17.8M individuals, taking out 5,091 birds a year is .04 per cent of an estimated population which is highly sustainable."

Mr Godson said Especially when across the world a sustainable offtake in based game species is somewhere between 10 and 20pc.

"The minister in 2020 - 2021 didn't declare a quail season because he said there was no data on their populations so we had asked the department to get some data for us," he said.

"I actually provided a proposal through a professor at the University of New England which the department knocked back because it was too expensive.

"Conservation and Hunting Alliance of South Australia and myself got out there and with a whole lot of volunteers put together some data.

"I will carry on and continue this study for an extra two years so I turned it into an actual three year study project which will provide some really good information into the future."

The survey results found densities in over 100 of the properties surveyed.

Mr Godson said in the Yorke Peninsula - a favoured location for hunters - which had 30 properties they counted and were able to get an estimated density of 1.67 quail per hectare.

"In the Murray lands which stretched from around Meningie to around the upper Murray lands near the border, we had 38 properties with a density that ranged from .33 and 1.17 quail per ha," he said.

"In the south east of the state we had 21 sites which showed an estimated density of 1.14 quail/ha.

"The other sites, Eyre Peninsula, Northern regions and Kangaroo Island we had single digit sites, which hopefully in the next survey later this year we will be able to get more properties."

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Mr Godson said they would like to get more farmers on board.

"They are at the cull face for counting these birds for us because they are the ones who are harvesting their fields and see the birds fly up so it certainly would be fantastic to get more farmers involved with counting quail," he said.

Mr godson says SSAA and CHASA will advertise this project earlier than November as it was a mad rush.

"We were potentially waiting on the government to come up with an idea to count quail but they didn't so we did," he says.

"I will still be receiving some survey returns within the next month as well as harvest was a little bit delayed in areas and some people were still harvesting and counting while I had to get my initial data into the department.

"We went with November because it's the harvesting season, with this method of survey we chose, you can only really do it once a year and that's when the particular crop is being harvested.

"This was sort of picked out to be an exhaustive count where we know the harvesters have gone up and down a field of a known size and the people have been able to count the birds as they do it, so we were then able to calculate a density."

Mr Godson said the survey helped provide the minister with data to confidently make a decision on quail season because of the abundance of quail and the actual sustainability of hunting.

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