Figured some on here don’t get to hear them much…

Amazing at the sheer number of wild birds in southern Georgia quail managed habitat.

I used to spend a lot of time on Ichuway Plantation and the quail were unreal. I was told by a manager that they had about $2,000 in management for every quail harvested on the property in the early 2000's. If you worked there either as staff or as a graduate student, you were required to participate in prescribed burns.

Yep! Fire is THE tool in southern pine forests!!!

Yeah, behind that sign was burned this year and that’s the regrowth. The outsides of the feed trails were burned this year. Next year the inside of the feed trails will be burned. There’s approximately 41 miles of feed trails on 2500ac. To combat against deer and hogs we use grain sorghum rather than corn for feeding. We always have available cover next to the feed trails for the quail. During the warmer months we feed every 4 weeks. During the colder months it’s every 2 weeks.
Fire, feeding, and trapping helps with the number of birds we have.

The entire South (due to fire) used to look like those low basal area "quail plantations". Now, those areas are only found scattered as islands of quail woods across the South....

...except between Thomasville area towards Tallahassee....where there is an almost solid, unbroken, heavily managed mature pine forest like this. Absolutely stunningly beautiful country...but then I'm very partial to Deep South pine forests.

We had some bad stands of 10-15 year old pines and sold them as chip wood. We used part of that acreage to start a dove field and planted the rest in Slash. The owners son will eventually hunt those pines with his kids.

One of the landowners I trap for had probably 25-30 year old pines that had never even been thinned, much less select cut. He wanted advise on how to increase critters on his place. We put him in touch with a forester and 4 years later he has some newly planted pines and plenty of natural brush now in his select cut pines. And yeah, plenty of critters! Turkeys are everywhere, he now has coveys of quail, and they took a B&C the last two years. It’s amazing to see someone wanting something and eliciting help from those that know what they’re doing.
Every property I trap has all the same ingredient in common…habitat with a burning schedule.

Tall Timbers refers to the Thomasville to Tally as the Redhills. We’re lumped under the Albany area. We’ve visited several of the plantations in the Redhills area at their Field Days. Always cool to see what “serious money” can produce.