Transcriber: Kyra Howell Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
When I was 10, like many other kids,
my favorite part of school was the weekends.
Yeah, I didn't like to really sit around and watch TV
or goof around at all, really.
What I liked to do is explore.
And my favorite place to explore was the grasslands and woods
near our small cabin in Bowie, Texas.
One day, I was walking through those woods with my dad
when - boom!
The ground erupted below me.
Wind rushed past my hair.
I squeezed my eyes so tight I could only see white.
I thought I had been bit by a rattlesnake,
maybe stepped on a landmine.
But I looked up towards my dad, and he was laughing.
He said, "Those were quail."
Oh! Quail!
I was hooked.
It's that exhilaration that drove my passion for hunting
well through high school.
And it's one of the things I missed most when I was in the Navy.
I couldn't wait to get back home and hunt some quail.
But when I got home in 1996, all the quail in that area were gone.
That's really what started my passion and why I'm here tonight.
I wanted to study quail.
In fact, I got a PhD in "quail."
(Laughs)
And tonight, I come to you as the nation's quail professor,
where my job is to talk to our nation's farmers and ranchers
about America's greatest game bird,
my favorite game bird: the bobwhite quail.
Now, you may not be as familiar with quail as I am, and that's okay
because tonight, what I want to share with you
is not only why those quail are important to me and those farmers and ranchers,
but why they're critically important to you.
I call quail the canary of the prairie.
And you probably recall, before ventilation was a thing,
those coal miners used to placed canaries in cages
and set them along the mine shafts.
As long as they could see that canary move or hear that canary sing,
they knew their air was safe to breathe.
But a silent, dead canary meant something was wrong:
their environment had become unsafe.
Well, quail are the canary of the prairie.
They live in our nation's prairies and grasslands,
and just like that canary, they're very sensitive to environmental change.
The key environmental factor for quail is tall grass
and thousands of acres of it.
Now, that tall grass is important to quail because it protects them from predators
like hawks and bobcats.
And that tall grass is important to me and you
because it cleans the air we breathe,
it filters the water we drink,
and it plays a critical role in sequestering carbon.
So, quail are the canaries of the prairie,
and as long as those populations are moving along
and singing their famous song,
(Mimics quail call)
everything's going to be alright.
But a silent, dead quail population?
That means something's wrong and our grasslands are unhealthy.
Well, quail have been telling us
that something's wrong for quite some time.
If you look at the graph of their populations,
you can see they've declined 80% since 1967.
And if I can draw you back, just for a second, back to 1996,
you'll see that we had lost well over half our quail by that time.
If we can visualize that year,
you'll see that quail had waned in the Northeast
and only high densities existed in the Midwest.
We were worried then.
But fast forward seven years,
and you'll see those high densities are gone.
Fast forward seven more, and you'll start to see holes in the population.
Now, this last graph is from only two years ago,
and you can see quail are gone in those northern states.
And if you draw a line from Pennsylvania down to East Texas,
those states are probably next.
Quail are becoming silent, and they're telling us something's wrong.
They're telling us our grasslands are unhealthy and going away.
In fact, in 2014, we lost more acres of grassland to agriculture
than the Amazon rainforest did to deforestation.
And hardly a word was mentioned.
So, what's the culprit?
Grass, of course, right?
It's more important, more profitable, for those farmers and ranchers
to put that into food than save some grass for some little bird.
Can't fault them for that.
However, the typical result of conventional farming and ranching
looks something like this,
where the ground is plowed,
and the grass is grazed down to the ground.
Not one bobwhite would survive.
Little to no carbon would be sequestered there,
and if rain did fall on that ground,
it would surely run off or erode that ground.
And farmers and ranchers would have to spend a lot of money
on things like pesticides and fertilizer for regrowth.
My research shows that those pesticides,
they're very detrimental to quail and human health.
"So, what do we do?" you ask.
Well, we could start by growing some taller grass.
But to do that, we'd need to change the face of agriculture.
And as I travel around the country as the nation's quail professor,
I see three real solutions to do this.
The first is grazing.
That's right.
If you want more grass, graze it.
But do it with regenerative grazing.
Regenerative grazing is a little different than your conventional grazing.
It takes those big pastures and divides them into smaller ones.
It takes those cattle and puts them into one big herd.
That one big herd moves around those small pastures
over the duration of the year,
allowing those recently grazed areas to rest and grow back their grass.
That one big herd presses the manure and urine into the ground
and acts as natural fertilizer.
This grows back the grass really fast,
and you get a quicker return on your clean air,
your filtered water and your sequestered carbon.
This picture that you're looking at is from 2011 in Texas
on a regenerative grazing site.
It was the year of our worst drought,
but you can see, on this site, we had everything we're looking for.
We had tall grass, lots of quail, no monetary loss for the landowner,
and good health benefits for me and you.
Now, the second solution I see you may find a little shocking.
I think we need more quail hunting.
I know, I know.
It may seem counterintuitive to most of you that,
"If you want more quail, hunt them."
But conservation, be it for wildlife, for quail, for grasslands
is almost entirely funded by hunters.
Hunters have placed a voluntary tax on themselves
so for every sale of a gun, a bullet, a hunting license,
those taxes are directly returned to conservation.
Now, my research shows
that a private landowner would be very wise to invest in quail hunting.
It's part of a $2.8 billion upland game bird industry,
and quail hunters play a major role.
They spend $9,000 a year per hunter, and that comes out to $243 per bird.
That's a major incentive for that landowner
to grow more grass, have more quail, put a little money in his pocket,
and provide health benefits for me and you.
Now, this third solution is a little more complex,
and it's a call for quail corridors.
Now, quail corridors are vast expanses of grassland
so that quail can move freely
and we'd have that tall grass.
If you take a look at the amount of public land
we have in the United States,
and then you overlay the grasslands
and then you slowly take them away,
what you'll see is that about 90% of our grasslands are privately owned.
And those good ranches are very sporadic in that area.
So, I propose we connect them, building these big grassland corridors,
with public land
paid for by those conservation tax dollars.
It would certainly get our grasslands pointed back in the right direction,
start building them back.
And it would meet all our requirements.
We'd have tall grass, lots of quail,
a little money in the pocket for those involved,
and you know the health benefits by now.
We'd have cleaner air, cleaner water and more sequestered carbon.
Well, if you're not a land owner or a policy maker,
I'm sure you're wondering, "What can you do?"
I say, be like the 10-year-old Kelly.
Go out there and explore those beautiful grasslands.
Get involved.
Take a kid, take them hunting.
Be the next grassland hero.
Of course, you could donate to our research
at the University of North Texas.
But you know the message now.
We need vast expanses of healthy grassland,
and your health is in the hands of our nation's farmers and ranchers.
We can change the face of agriculture and quail.
What you know now is just a messenger, the canary, if you will.
And if we can save them, even if it's one quail at a time,
we can save the health of all Americans.
Thank you.
(Applause)