The MeatEater PodcastSteven Rinella talks with Ron Kendall, Brody Henderson, Cory Calkins, Corinne Schneider, and Phil Taylor.
Topics discussed: More on cowboy hats in airports; spearfishing in Montana; explaining environmental toxicology; the treats to the Bobwhite quail; the boll weevil; coveys of quail; buzz bombs; the art of wing shooting; fire ants; Operation Idiopathic Decline; eye worms; mating inside the eye; caecal worms; surpassing the cycle; Quail Guard; and more.
Outro song "Hunters and Hounds" by Allen Wayne
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This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast, you can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com, f I R S T L I T E dot com. I'm not in the plumbing or appliance business, so I can share this hot tip for the listeners that happen to be in plumbing and appliance, in particular the intersection of plumbing and appliance. This came to me literally, it came into being a dream. In a dream, I was staying in a hotel and I was standing in the shower in the hotel and realize that there's one of those little espresso machines in there in the shower.
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No? No, I was astounded. In the dream. I was blown out.
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Tea listen, man, I know, and I'm just throwing it out there because I'm not in a position to capitalize on it. I'd have to move into plumbing, appliances, coffee business, coffee business, hotel contracting. I mean, come on, man's only got man's only got so much time. Joined today by doctor Ron Kendall, Professor of Toxicology. Yes at Texas State University. This is gonna be our first ever. There's two first. What did I say Texas State? I didn't. Is there such a thing? Yeah, I'm at Texas Tech. Okay, but is there a Texas State? Yeah? There is so many huh sorry, sorry about that Texas Tech. Uh, which I'm just gonna go out on a lemon say it's better than Texas State Texas Tech. And there's there's multiple first here. Because this is our first ever episode. I don't know how we've missed this in all the billion years we've been making the show. This is the first ever episode where we focused on the plight of the Bob White quail. Not only that, the other first is doctor Kendall has And people might hear this and they might not be overwhelmed by it, but just hear us out. We're gonna explain why the first ever FDA approved vaccine for wild birds. Now, this is coming at a time when vaccines are exceedingly divisive in American culture. You know, I'd be arguing about the COVID vaccine all the time. You still get in trouble for talking about this. They's still like ban you from YouTube for sand's controversial. So the vaccines has been in the news. But here we have a case of the first ever FDA approved vaccine for wild birds, and we're going to talk about that in the context of what in the hell has happened to all of the quail everywhere?
Absolutely, I mean.
A whole culture in some states, like the entire culture of quail hunting is vanished in a lifetime.
That's true.
My friends in Texas, my buddy Brad in Texas, they have they have a big family property and they have the quail. They still have the quail hunting trucks. All the art is quail hunting art.
Did you guys have any around when you were a kid in Michigan.
You had to go a little bit south southern, not a little bit.
My dadad and my like my friends' dads used to talk about how they used to quail hunt in Pennsylvania and they're just like they were all gone by the time I was hunting.
When I was still in college. So in the nineties we would go every winter over Christmas break and hunt quail in southern Illinois. They ain't there, right, Yeah, Uh, Brad's placed atteria. You go in all the art, it's quail hunting art. They like, are not. They don't hunt quail. M It ceased to be a thing.
Where did they used to be?
Well, we're going to talk about all that in a minute. First're gonna talk about cowboy hats. We're gonna getting at all that.
So much.
Listener feedback on my observation that that I was like, I was saying that I had a rather end fact, you know, perhaps an end defensible position, Doctor Kenda'll be curious to get your opinion on this. Or I was saying, if you're not livestock adjacent, you have no business running around in a cowboy hat. And I equated it too that if I ran around in a police uniform, if I dressed up like a cop, people would that would be odd, right, people would be like, where's he get off dressing up like a cop? I think you're reaching, But you can dress up like a cowboy without repercussion?
Yeah, I mean you get mad at like like I don't know some rock star.
Well, a police uniform designates a certain amount of like authority that they can I.
Think of a cowboys having more authority than a cop.
You're viewing it as an occupational like uniform type thing versus like a fashion thing.
I'm just saying, think of the world and think of a world in which you could just run around in a police uniform. Right, it would be chaos. But why is it okay that you can run around on the cowboys suit as.
It doesn't.
Cowboy uniform and a cowboy hat? I mean, I feel like you need one more piece of a tire.
A duster.
If you have a cowboy hat and a dust, you know.
You know, you know. The American Prairie Reserve, the movement in that area against the APR, against the American Prairie Reserve is like and even the even the head of the American Prairieserve acknowledges the genius of Save the Cowboys Stop APR right like a marketing however you feel, I personally am like like, ah, like you know, willing seller, willing buyer. They're buying land that's for sale, and as you know, sort of a foundational American principle is that when you buy land, you can do what you want with it. And so if the APR is buying land that's currently for sale and choosing to look at it or whatever, it's their business. I don't know. True, it doesn't mean you got loved, but I mean it's like it's kind of like an American principle, you know, you buy if you bought property and said, you know what, I decided on my property, I don't want any fences. It's like, why is that some insulting to people?
It gets a little uncomfortable when we think about in Texas, remember that one spot in Texas, in that one place in Georgia where there were monkey farms.
Well, you're right, you're right.
That's when you know then you're like that slippery I know.
But I'm seeing I'm I'm doing like Devil's advocacy and I'm trying to make a much broader point. So scrap the APR thing. What was I even talking about.
That for Save the Cowboy?
That's right.
People that are opposed to it say like that it's a brilliant bit of marketing. Save the Cowboy, Stop the APR. So I view it like my I'm trying to save the American cowboy, the integrity of the American cowboy. Meaning what if I see a guy, I'm like that there is a real cowboy. I'll stay to my kids that there as a cowboy. Now, I don't know, I could be getting duped.
Could be.
So you should have to have like a a carrying card to be a real cowboy.
We just had the people in from the Shoshone and a rapa Hole tribes that they have to carry they have to carry what they were calling their Indian car. Yeah, sure, dude, ranch hands and stolen cowboy valory. This generated some KRIN pulled some good feedback from it. Guy says, I was just listening to Steve's rant on episode six fourteen about a fake ranch hand at the airport and the prevalence of people wearing cowboy hats. He goes on, I understand that Steve feels like most people he sees he has seen wearing a cowboy hat lately, have no business wearing one. As a US Marine Corps veteran, I fully understand his point of view. There are a lot of dipshits that buy surplus military unit I don't know this was the thing. There are a lot of dipshits that buy surplus military uniforms and pretend to be service memors veterans for the attention instead of growing a pair and actually joining the armed forces. However, as someone who did serve, I am not bothered in the slightest by those here. He uses a term I have never encountered.
It's an interesting, colorful one.
So that term, which I've never encountered. It combines the word knuckle with a euphemism for fornicator. Ninety nine percent of them are just this, he goes on. Ninety nine percent of them are just attention seeking fools who mean no harm, pose no harm, and rarely fool anyone worth fooling. The most they will ever achieve is a few moments of stolen valor. He's speaking not about the military uniform. I think he's speaking about stolen valor, Like is wearing a cowboy hat when you're not in the livestock business. This is stolen valor, not quite so funny.
I love this guy, I love it.
Stolen valor. He goes on. But even though I understand Steve's misgivings about wannabe cowboys, his contempt is misplaced. It's a hat. People like different types of hats. It's their right to express themselves freely, and I will fully defend anyone exercising that right, even the right school, even the night school, rejects that dress up as service members or cops.
That's a little harsh on the night school.
Long story short, everyone could tell the difference between a real cop, cowboy, veteran, et cetera, and the wannabes. Additionally, it's kind of weird that Steve has so bent out of shape over the cultural appropriation of cowboys.
Let the clowns be clowns.
Love you, William another guy. This is in reference to episode six fourteen quote. I'm quoting him here, Steve was complaining about people in cowboy hats. As much as I agree with his opinion on this, Steve needs a little reminder that these want to be cowboy hipsters are currently keeping the beaver pelt market alive. And well, I've acknowledged this again and again. Every time I bring it up. I acknowledge this. He goes out and say, well, I may think these people look like idiots, as long as my beaver pelts keep selling, they can play dress up all they want. Another one called cowboy hats on Liberals dear me eater Krue, Steve again got talking about his disdain for folks wearing cowboy hats and other than western wear who don't work in a livestock adjacent industry. I think his point can fundamentally be distilled into the perspective that cowboy hats and boots are you specific, and if you don't work in that industry, then the need for their use doesn't exist. But I think Steve should consider a broader user group. Many people go on trail rides or visit dude ranches on vacation, so they may well have a legitimate use for cowboy hats and cowboy boots.
No, you can ride a horse with a baseball hat on dude.
The fact that he would need a cowboy hat to go to a dude.
Ranch that's the dress up he's taught. He's like referring to right now.
He says, legitimate use a wider brim tat keeps the sun off.
Here's the sun off, you know.
Okay, but let's say you were out golfing all that day because the sun is still shining.
Yeah, it'd be just it's appropriate on a golf.
Course.
Why is it that when you're out in the sun and there's a horse by you, you suddenly need a higher level of neck for tect. I mean, like if they were out digging ditches all day. It doesn't have anything to do with anything.
It seems like the cowboy hat is just a superior hat I had better at doing its job than a cat.
I'm trying to give airspace to the opposing viewpoint here, but I'll tell you this. I had exposure for a number of years to a dude ranch through circumstances I'll not get into, but I had some I would have. I would be a number of times spent a little bit of time at a dude ranch. And oddly the people that worked there were the most cowboy dressing up people on the planet. But they were all rich, kid, they were all rich boarding school kids and their parents would go to the Dude Ranch. Okay, rich kids from out East. They'd grow up going to the dude Ranch and playing cowboy. Then they get older and they get a little rebellious, and then they go to work at the place for a while as sort of like this little act of rebellion, and they would dress up like seventies cowboys. So everybody that works there dresses like a cowboy from the seventies. Everybody that works there, I don't know, like the Marlboro Man, like yeah, yeah, like silk scarf. You know, if you go and watch Ranchody Lucks, they all dressed like Ranchody Lucks. Yeah, and like yeah like seventies.
Like Reynolds and what was the trans Am movie?
Yeah, stuff like like yeah, you know when you uh and and there's like it's hard to express it. There's a little bit of like at this dude ranch too, there's a little bit of like a little sexy mixed in right up.
Hm, that seems right.
He goes on, did I get into anyways? He says, here he's attack. In my viewpoint, there's no different than wearing a cowboy, or no more different than dressing like a policeman. He says, the name is the same is not true for a police outfit. The public generally can't go on a ride along and dressed like cops as part of their vacation. It's a valid point, and it's probably illegal to impersonate a police officer. I think cowboy hats and boots are more similar to motorcycle jackets and boots. They serve a real purpose when you are riding, but it's also okay to wear them when you are not riding. Same with hiking boots and pants, or the scholarly apparel that Randall might wear, such as a tweed blazer with elbow patches. That mean said, I totally agree that spurs and the airport are a bit much. He goes on. A few years back, I made plans to go trail riding for the first time. I wanted a cowboy hat, but there aren't any Western wear stores near me in New Jersey. Even though John Stetson, this is a little thing I didn't know, even though he goes on, even though John Stetson is from New Jersey. So I ordered a Stetson hat off Amazon. It came in a plastic bag as a pancake.
Oh.
I processed the return and the new one also came, and Amazon told me to just keep the old one. I did that five more times and ended up with seven Stetsons, all flat. Then COVID hit and I never went a trail riding.
I think maybe he wasn't getting legit stats, and from his Amazons.
He says he's been wearing it gardening instead.
Did you label this cowboy hats on liberals?
Or was that?
Was that fair thing?
Because I would argue that the tourists wearing cowboy hats is mostly from like conservatives from Orange County who move up here because they're tired of liberal California and they're like, I'm gonna wear my cowboy hat.
Yeah, like I've had enough of the bullshit exactly, I'm going to Montana and getting the cowboy hat.
Hello, fellow cowboys, how are you? How do you do?
Last one? Is this the last one? Last one? Airport cowboy hats? He begins his note with salutations. I couldn't help but think about Steve's disdain for people dressing his cowboys in the airport and wonder what the difference is between that and anyone wearing a baseball Jersey to a baseball game. I'm going to my kids tonight. I'm going to the there's a thing for my kids debate for debate club debate. Jimmy, Oh, this guy's not invited. Okay, so he's wanting to compare it.
Okay.
It's not like the fan is going there to pinch hit or step on the mound because the entire bullpen was somehow injured, but rather to support who they're rooting for. Chances are people in the stats and and Spurs are not cheering on their home team on the range. But would it be fair to say that maybe they're such big fans of the West lifestyle that they choose to portray themselves in that fashion. I don't believe the two situations are exact replicas of one another, meaning it's an imperfect analogy, but they seem hand in hand. Sports fans who waste their time and money dressing like overpaid, whiny athletes is a close enough comparison. In my less than humble opinion.
I disagree. Yeah, also athletes taking astray what's going on here?
I think I think that's the one toward the end is a good point.
It's a great point. It's almost too obvious right here. He goes on to say, as for Steve's a version for cowboy hats that aren't in a hands, that aren't in livestock adjacency. He goes on, he says, I wonder how the non hunting public view cameo worn anywhere, but the woods no no camo has become not the same. I don't think you should wear it if you don't like I would question wearing it if you're not in an outdoor adjacency lifestyle like snowboarders. That annoys me, and I could pick that up as my next thing that annoys me. I'm shopping around.
I gotta show.
Though it's a small part of this based in the fact like that you feel like you just can't pull off a cowboy hat yourself.
We've seen Steven a cowboy hat. I think he looked swell, swell.
I'll return again to Ronnie Bamb to two things. Ronnie Bam told me never wear a hat that says hello before you do. And I wear a fur hat but I'm a trapper and uh and uh what was this other one?
Personality has more personality?
Yeah, and likewise, he says, this. He said, never wear a hat that has more personality than you do.
This should be a shirt. It should be a podcast inspired meat eater shirts, cowboy hat with that, or like you know Raccoon had.
And a yeah, hey did you did you? Did you eliminate the need for Brody to talk about Oh no, Brodie, are you ready?
Oh?
Are we jumping to spearing? Just very quickly, let me scroll back up. They're still at the top.
Well, I thought you, I thought you were researching it.
I get that.
We got a letter from someone here in Montana. Just wanted to make sure that all interested parties were aware that amendment to the Montana Fishing Regulations had just has just been proposed that would open the Western Western District. Montana's divided into three fishing districts, East, Central, West, open the Western district up to spear fishing for northern Pikes. Have remembers of the crew are major proponents of spearfishing. He's just trying to like he supports this thing, he likes the idea. I'm not sure if this thing will get approved or not. But the thing is is a lot of Western Montana's waters are already open to spearfishing.
For northern pike.
Like, where there's pike, it's generally a lot of them. You can already go spearfishing, not all, not all, but a lot of them because they have pike in a lot of places they'd rather not have them. But they're not going anywhere. But it's basically like a free for all on them where they are. Like you were saying, the sea Lestwan, the clearwater. There's a small lake.
Outside of.
But yeah, yeah, so there are already places where you can do that.
I don't have a problem with it, Like, I think it'd be great. I think it'll probably pass because they're trying to slow down the spread of North. I call him Northeast. When I was a kid, like my county, I lived in twin Town, but it was a Moskegon county, but there was a there's a wealthy neighborhood called North Miskegon, and everyone that didn't live in Northkegon hated like class and we called Northeast. Gotcha, everybody hated them except them.
Yeah, I mean, there's places where you can shoot pike with rifles. What's a big deal with with spearing them?
Where can you shoot a pike with a rifle?
I think there's still a seat there. May it may have been ended, but there at a time, like in Vermont, you could shoot them with rifles some places in the Northlake, Vermont.
Yeah, that seems like it encourage some hazardous behavior. Man, they may have ended it, but they're taking shots at a shallow angle over hear the neighbor's house.
Or something that you shot on a fish or two in your life.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
A little off topic. But I grew up in Whitefish and had a school mate acquaintance kid that was like two grades older than me, Die Spearfish in Whitefish Lake. He punctured a electric wire under the water.
Super sad.
Yeah, shot never the ice spearing, not spearfishing.
No, he was under the water in the summer, swimming around looking for carp I believe, and uh a wire, yeah, electric, I believe. It was a two twenty vault to a water pump that was probably water in somebody's lawn. Yeah, he never came up, and his friend that realized he never came up dove in after him and when he touched him to release him, he got electrocuted, almost died too, but he didn't. I never heard what ended up happening if there was a lawsuit or whatever.
Yeah, I want to jump one thing about this spearfishing thing. You know how spearfish and walleye is legal in like lake? Is it Lake Michigan.
Well, it's legal, it's it's it's legal north of thunder Bay on the Lake Huron side, and it's no, it's legal south of thunder Bay on Lake hereon, and it's legal south of Grand Haven on Lake Michigan side.
And real guys get all bent out of shape about it.
Well, they don't have any reason to be because what they did they made a special license. So they know how many spearfishing certificates are being sold, and all spearfishermen have to submit a report, and they're going to be quite surprised at how few exactly wally dogs are getting killed relative to Roden real guys. And I don't think it is that contentious, right, It is a non thing.
It's a non thing that I mean there when I was doing my research there at it, and something I found was that there'd be.
Conflict. They made it.
They went and made it provisional subject to revisiting, and it's it's a non issue. It's a non issue. But that's even different because they're talking about a native fish like you could always spear trash fish. I don't like to use that term. It rough fish, non game, non game. I take that back, Phil edit me out saying that it make it make its like.
Non game.
You'd always be a non game. And they're trying to open up like like Walleye Northeast, it might just be like primarily Walleye and there.
And Montana is weird too because they have like in some places in the state, game fish are game fish, certain species of game fish or game fish, and then you go somewhere else in the state and that species is not managed as a game fish, like yellow perch. There's places where there's no limit. Then in Canyon Fairy you can only keep.
Ten, which makes them a game fish. They magic to become a game fish. So it gets confusing. All right, we'renna talk about well are you ready? Can you explain toxicology doctor Kendall? I think of drunk people, Okay, I can.
First of all, Steve, I'm glad to glad to be here and listen to this interesting conversation.
What's your take on it? On the cowboy hat deal, like if you were a dictator of the world, Well, I think you got something there.
I come from West Texas and we have true cowboys there, and generally speaking, we see true cowboys dressed as cowboys with cowboy hats associated with livestock or some agricultural industry. I in fact have a cowboy hat because I have a ranch with cows. So that's the real nature cards.
To talk about this, He's.
Got a cowboy card.
So I got my cowboy card and I sold and bought a lot of cattle. Believe it or not, but an environmental toxicologist environmental toxicologist is an individual studying the the transport, fate and effects of chemicals and drugs on wildlife and human health how it affects reproduction, well being, and your health, including cancer. So that's what I do, and I've done it all over the world. I've traveled the world in my work and have been involved with the formation of what we call the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry that just celebrated its forty fifth annual meeting, bringing in people from all over the world this year to Fort Worth, Texas. And that's my forty fifth meeting. A charter member. So I've been involved a long time in this field. In fact, even in my high school and in my college days working with insect toxicologists that were developing chemicals to kill insects that affected cotton. Well, the question the bull weavil, and so.
I wouldn't know one if I saw one.
Well, I know what they look like and h But anyway, I got exposed to this kind of thinking a long time ago because at that point I was just a teenager working in a lab, and at that time, people didn't really think about what those chemicals were doing to our environment and to our fish and wildlife resources and to our health. Those were the days that kids would drive behind a truck spraying DDT to kill mosquitoes and they're just riding the fog. So, I mean, we just didn't understand that. So what I've been involved with is really a very challenging, interesting field, but also a sobering feel because on a global basis, we are dramatically impacting our planet and it concerns me with the loss of biodiversity and the amount of chemicals and chemical transport that now we're identifying, even in remote areas of the Arctic in the rainforest and so on. But as we were talking earlier, you were mentioning what happened to the quail, and you know, I was Karinn and I were talking. When I came in. She said, where are you from, Texas? And I said, no, I actually grew up in Florence, South Carolina. It was not far from Myrtle Beach. It's called the coastal Plain of South Carolina. And I grew up in the country. And I was lucky to have a grandfather that mentored me to the outdoors, and he gave me a lot of my environmental ethic. And he was taking me quaal hunting. I guess I was six or seven years old, and would walk around behind him as he would quail hunt. I didn't have a gun, but I was just so interested. And he had a fine bird hunting dog, a Llewellen Setter, and it used to be so interesting to me to watch him quaal hunt, and he was a very good shot. So by the time I got to be twelve years old, my grandfather actually would let me use his iron bird dog, and I started the quail hunt. And I can remember getting my first quail now when I was a kid in South Carolina. I actually hunted in a five mile radius of my house. I knew, I knew that territory. I walked it. I walked it and walked, and I had a map, and my map identified quail coves and in the fall.
Help me understand what that means.
For I'm gonna explain Steve, what a covey is is.
Well, I mean the map. You're gonna get to that too. I'm gonna get to the mall great, because I need to see one of these maps.
Well, that map was like priceless to me because it identified where the covees were. Okay, it is where I found a covey and a covey of quail in the fall of the year back when I was a kid, maybe fifteen or twenty quail twenty five quail in a group, and they they roost on ground together in a circle. Each night they feed together, and they for protection and also for thermal regulation. Well, the bird dog, the hunting dog. When I have five Llewellen Setters today, but those dogs learn how to trail that scent and they point the covey okay, maybe fifteen twenty yards away ten yards and then you walk in front of the dog, and those those when those quail come up as a cuvey. That's pretty pretty sporty shooting because most people they get so emotional when that big hovey comes up and you got twenty buzz bombs taken off, they can't focus. So it's a real art form. You gotta pick one out, you gotta pick one out, and you gotta stay on him. So it's a real art form of wing shooting. Okay. In this map, I was a kid, loved the outdoors and loved my fishing, and in it was my quail hounting. And so I had this map and I had generated of all the covey haunts that I could I could. I knew where I could go and find three or four covees in a two hour period based on that particular terrain. So you know, my interest in quail goes back to the very beginning. And what's so so concerning now is that I could literally walk out my back door sometime where I grew up and there'd be a covey of quail walking across the backyard.
Okay, and that when you were when you were a kid, I was a kid.
Now in that five mile radius of where I grew up. You might be lucky to find one covey where when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, there'd be fifty sixty, eighty covees. Okay, so the impact has been dramatic. Now I'm real four fortunate my quaal hunting buddies from a kid from twelve years old, we still hunt together. We still bird hunt together. They're both medical doctors in South Carolina, and so they they tell me, I mean, basically, wild quail hunting as we knew it as kids is gone unless you're spending massive amount of money to manage your ranch or something. So we've seen this happening across most of the wild Bob White quail hunting range.
You might laying out that range for folks.
Yes, the wild Bob White.
Just to clarify my question, pick some point, I don't know, like some it could be nineteen fifty, it could be fourteen ninety two, I don't know, like like at some point, where were they?
You know, the wild quail wile Bob White is a historically valuable game bird, and we often call them the canary of the prairie. They're good indicator species of grassland birds. In fact, the bob white is among the most declining bird in America today.
It's amazing.
And so the bob white looking back in time, probably had huntable populations and up to twenty five states through the southeast out into Texas, up into the Iowa, you know, Kansas and so on. So when we look at it now, some of the best quail hunting left in America is in West Texas and southern Texas. But it's West Texas's where I've done a lot of my research. And we call it the Alamo of wild quail hunting left in North America for bob white quail. And so you know, it's really an interesting thing to look at as we're losing this biodiversity. Okay, and because the wild quail people love them in Texas, and there's so much interest in preserving and conserving them, not just hunting them. But they are just an important indicator species of our grassland birds. So I originally came to Texas, Caran, you were asking me, I originally came to Texas in nineteen ninety seven to found an institute called the Institute of Environmental and Human Health. Okay, and I was also a founding chairman of the Department of Environmental Toxicology where we trained doctoral and master students and now the field of environmental toxicology. When I was a graduate student, we didn't have those degrees, okay, so this is an important degree now. And the last twelve years after moving out as director and chair, I founded the Wildlife Toxicologyaboratory, and that's where we have worked extensively with the United States Food and Drug Administration and to develop a treatment for a disease in our wild quail. Let me back up a little bit as we look at agriculture and habitat impacts to our wild quail populations. That's very significant and for the listeners, the habitat means where quail live, where they occupy to reproduce and survive the winter and breathe in the spring and the summer. So we've seen increase in predator populations like hawks. Okay, we can't shoot a wildhawk anymore, so they're all protected. Well, a lot of them feed on quail, including the Cooper's hawk, which is the most significant aerial predator to the wild quail. And so we've seen changes in agriculture. Of course, heavy agricultural chemical use, Okay, that exposes quail and so on. So I look at it as a multitude of variables that have come together to suppress our wild quail.
Can I ask you just a timeline question, like, are we seeing the decline increase more twenty years ago, fifty years ago?
Absolutely?
I like, what's you know if we were to graph chart that, what are we looking at across a timeline.
Well, a lot of huntable populations have already been lost, say in the Carolinas and Virginia and so on. But as we even look at Texas for the last say, go back to the seventies to now, you're seeing a general decline. Okay, you have bumps of increases followed by crashes, all right, And that's that I want to get I'm going to get to that in just a minute. So, but if you look at the curve over time, the curb is generally going down about three or four percent a year, all right.
And that curve pitched off at a round when in the.
Seventies, approximately late sixties seventies. Okay, Because when I was hunting quail in the late sixties and early seventies, it was unbelievable. It's okay, and I'm talking about you could go out in an afternoon find ten or fifteen covees of wild quail, Okay, in an afternoon. It was nothing back then. Now people come and may go quail hunting just a few years ago, even in Texas, and I'd heard maybe they find one covey and hunt a whole weekend, all right, So that's not very good quail hunting. And when my buddies from South Carolina come to Texas, their standard is at least twenty covees a day, okay hunting a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the afternoon. And generally I could provide that, but only in specific areas. And what when we first started looking at the whole quail question, it was largely precipitated by a major crash of our wild quail back in twenty ten in West Texas and on some of the finest habitat that you could have a place where quail lived. I mean, some of these ranches were superior. There was adequate rainfall, the cover looked great. We were seeing lots of broods of little baby quail. So everybody said, wow, I mean we're going to have an unbelievable year. Everything we were good, everything looked good. Well by the time we got to October November, nobody could find quail. I mean they were gone, and on one of the best ranches you could find. It's a picture book quail hunting ranch. They didn't hunt for five ye five years. They and they had before that had some of the finest quail hunting that you could have ever imagined. It took five years to recover that population, even in a good zone of West Texas. So this generated a large research initiative funded by sportsman Steve in Texas Park City's Quail Coalition of the Rolling Planes, Quail Research Foundation and so on sportsmen and they said, we have got to figure out, when we have this kind of habitat and perfect conditions, climate and so on, for that particular year in twenty ten, what the heck happened to dark quail. They were literally gone. And our data suggested that we're not talking about losing some of them on some of the ranches we were looking at, We're talking losing ninety percent, all right. And so this began a multi university research initiative to look at environmental contaminants, pesticides, viruses, bacteria and so on?
Was the fire ant in the mix? And if not? Can you hit on that? I hear that all the time.
Well, I know a lot about the fire ant. You're going to have got me off track there, but I'll address it. Well, No, I decided, like.
The whole what happened when I have this conversation with people who are not as not authorities like you are in the mix? Is this like fire ants well kill babies?
Believe it or not. For my master's degree at Clemson University, I studied the fire ants sol Anopsis and victa and and I know a lot about them. And uh, and we were at that time testing an organic chlorine pesticide called my rex that was utilized to be sprayed from an airplane and a corn cob grit bait that the ants would pick up and take into the mound and kill the queen. Okay, but it was an organic chlorine like DDT, So we ultimately couldn't use that anymore. And that's a whole nother story. Maybe we can do another podcast in organal chlorine pesticides.
I'd love you.
I'm serious, I'm serious and so, but in my opinion, they are part of the mix. But they didn't wipe out our quail. Okay, they just didn't.
And I'll tell you the argument is just so clear on it because I might be wrong about this. They uh, when the when the egg hatches, they bite the hatchling and kill it.
It's possible. But I can still remember, uh, I guess I was about sixteen years old. I was quail honeing near my home and this area, this field burned, and there were lots of quail in this field, like four or five covey all right, and there were fire ant mounds all over the place. And I looked at it and I said, wow, this is a good bit of fire ant mouns here and they're quail here. So the fire ant, in my opinion, does not necessarily wipe out the quail. They may have some impacts on when the hatchlings hatch and so on. It's no, it's not the big gun. It's not the silver bullet. And but what I'm going to tell you is I think we've identified one of the silver bullets that are really hitting our wild quail. And so so I talked about this big project called Operation idiopathic decline because nobody knew what was the cause. It was called idiopathic ido because nobody could When when a doctor does an operation ideopathic evaluation, they don't know what's wrong with you. And so so with the quail, this this terminology was coined with these foundations coming together, funding all of this multidisciplinary research, and what emerged and what's been a really undervalued area in wildlife conservation are diseases, okay, and so this has been one of the big unstudied areas that you know, I became a parasitologist and I never even thought I would engage that. So we so with this old ideal operation idiopath that declined, big research program. What emerged in Texas, particularly in Western Texas, was the occurrence of parasitic infections. And there were two parasites that we identified in our wild quail, and one was the eyeworm oxy spy rural pat rowley. The eyeworm what is an eye worm. It's a worm that has a sophisticated mouth part and it locates in the eye of a quail and it feeds on tissues and so on in the rear of the eye. Generally and including the heart what we call the hardarian glen, which is important for immune function and tear production. Nevertheless, this ie worm is located in the eye and there quite large. The female eyeworm adult will stretch across a penny. Okay, and if you extrapolated that ee worm in that little quail to your eye, that eyeworm would be the size.
Of a toothpick.
How were they picking this worm up?
Okay, good question. We have completely defined the life cycle and published this. Steve, the reader of the listeners here can go of my website at Wildlife Toxicology Lab dot org and everything I'm talking about we've published the world scientific literature. Okay, so we we we have pursued this step by step by step, and I'll get to the FDA work in a little bit because that was a decade of work.
Take your time.
But the ie worm is a pretty sophisticated creature. They have a very sophisticated mouth where they can attach and feed. But they've been around a long time. We're not completely sure of their in total total biological history, but they are ninety six percent related to the Central African eyeworm in the human called loa loa, and that worm in a human can damage the eye, can result in blindness, actually can penetrate the brain. Okay, So that eeworm in a quail is highly related to a pathological infection even in the human being. Okay.
Is the quail eye their cuisine of choice or do we see them in other bird species.
I'll get to that corin lots of good questions here the the it's a fascinating life history. But where the quail basically will release eyeworm eggs and it's droppings, Okay, as it's in a field feeting, and crickets and grasshoppers come along and eat the droppings, and they ingest the egg. The egg hatches in the cricket gut or the grasshopper and it develops into what we call the infective L three larvae. Okay, so there's it's a larvae. So the quail comes along and grabs that cricket. Believe it or not that that larvae can exit the exoskeleton of the cricket and migrate up the esophagus into the nasal sinus into the eye of the quail.
Coming out of the quails crop, yes, or gizzard or something and the crop in ten minutes, that's all. And what we get in the quail eats that cricket. Yep, and the cricket's got the larvae in its gut. Yeah, and that's something bitch comes out, shoots up into his nasal capaccy or cave, he gets in his eyeball.
You can't believe it, but it's true. In ten minutes. In ten minutes, that's so weird.
Does even know where to make a break for it.
It's a lot of things about biology we don't fully understand. But the only thing I know is number one. Then in faction carried by a given cricket may be more than one one infective FLORIVI. So one cricket could be ten ten eye worms. Okay, And then once that worm gets in the quail. What we've learned now is it pretty much is going to be there to the quail dies. Their long lived, very long lived, and they actually mate, the male and female mate in the eye and they they they produce eggs. We have the listeners can go to my website and see pictures. But the female eyeworm is loaded with eggs. They're egg producing machine and so so basically they release the eggs, they're they're swallowed, they're going to the elementary track over, it starts all over and so and what what is so amazing and we were the first ones to discover this is you can go from a relatively clean quail population, maybe with ten percent infection, to a month or six weeks later you have ninety five percent of your birds infected with eyeworms. Okay, so it happens very fast. The epidemiology is extremely interesting.
Is that because they're a bird that travels in tight little packs or.
We think that precipitates it, because you know there when they are with covees, do they do? There are exposed to each other every day. Now in the spring they break up and pair off, okay, and so that's when they're reproducing. But we're seeing that the infection with the eyeworm can literally emerge into a zonotic event fast. And so I as an environmental toxicologist studying this first, I said, is it plausible that we could go from a ranch to a county of infection in the matter of a month or two. Answers, Yes, it can. It travels fast.
How do the quails end up dying? What kills them.
Okay, Wow, you guys are are aggressive. You want to know, Well, uh, what we're seeing is we we we have we've had FDA demonstration ranches where we've been testing the medicated feed I invented. Okay, and the testimonials are amazing because one man and wife live on their ranch and they used to they wear my phone out calling me about quail flying into their windows and house and killing themselves. Okay, oh okay, because it affects vision. And so uh, once we started using the medicated feed on this particular ranch right at four years ago, not one quail has flown into that house.
Oh I was driving them blind. Yeah, that's what we ye know.
So yeah, and what you got to understand, Well, Steve, I'm a quail hunter, I gather, I'm an outdoorsman, I'm a rancher, and I'm a scientist. Okay, so I kind of bring it all together. So I'm not just in some lab pontificating. I actually understand quail, their biology, their behavior and so on. And so I've seen Cooper's hawks go after quail when a quail leaves the ground flying, they got to be ninety nine percent on the go or that Cooper's Hawk's probably gonna catch them. It's unbelievable, dynamic a watch.
That's why he's hauling ass like that. You got him and so and so.
What I'm trying to say is quail have got to be Olympians athletes every day. So anything that suppresses their energy or affects their keenness of sight and all, it puts them at a disadvantage. And we know this now because what we're seeing with our medicated feed. We just had a major scientific paper come out at the International Journal of Parasitology, Parasites and Wildlife. It's on my website people can look. But what we've been able to see is we've been able to increase our quail survivability with the use of the medicated feed up to forty percent annually, okay, which most people estimate less than ten percent will make it to the next year. God, we're seeing dramatic increase in survivability and a three hundred percent increase in the quail population compared to untreated sites in the same area. So the point is is we know these parasitic infections. Now we've got the evidence that they are impairing survivability of our wild quail.
Can you can you touch on that second parasite.
Yes, the second one that that we discovered and published a lot of papers on. Now, it's called the sekl worm, and it it lives in the secum of a wild quail. The secum is assisting the quail and digesting all the seeds it's eating. Okay, The Sicca worm lives and feeds there. And we've seen secle worm and what is.
That thing them? I'm not familiar.
It's just part of the digestive tract associated with the small intestine. Okay, But but again it's just it's it's an area that is secreting certain digestive enzymes, particularly for fiber digestion. All right, but these sickle worms can build up to large quantities in the quail. Now, Corinne, you asked what the our worm was. The Sicca worm is more than ninety percent related to the round worm or the scaret in your dog. It's essentially a scaret. And I saw your two dogs earlier today. I bet you you worm deworm your dogs regularly at least.
Yeah, well, she means to Yeah.
Well, I tell you these Sicca worms can build up, we found seventeen hundred and one quail. Oh and the poor quail.
It looked like from on the outside.
Well, the poor quail, you know, they have a well developed breast muscle because when they come off the ground, they explode and they're moving fifty miles an hour in just a few seconds. Okay, h a dog pointed this bird and the dog caught it. The bird couldn't fly, and so they brought it to us, and it had seventeen hundred sec worms. So I mean, and this particular group was reporting what we call feather piles of kills of quail kills on the ground. The predators were really hitting them hard. They were very infected with seka worms. So we think the secret worm is about as important as the eyeworm. Okay, now we've learned something from our brethren in Scotland and the United Kingdom where they hunt the red grouse, very important game bird over there, and the red grouse was suffering from dramatic population declines on given years. And research showed that the red grouse suffered from a worm and there seek them as well. Okay, was a sick of worm and it caused the birds not to be able to fly as fast because they reduced energy from aerial predators. And believe it or not, it caused the female grouse setting the eggs to emit. Emit a smell that the foxes could key in on and they were destroying all the nest. So so the behavior of the red grouse by the scientific team in the UK was studied. And you know, the red grouse is eating, you know, a lot of fiber, so they have to go get grit every day, all right, that's part of their behavior. And so the Scottish scientists identified where the grit piles were where the red grouse would go, and they said, if we could simulate a grit pile and put a drug in, maybe the grouse would eat it. Well they did, and they were able to knock out these infections, are suppress them and and the grouse. We're not experiencing these kind of population crashes anymore. So and I know this, know this team, and I've been on a program with them both at a quail seminar. But anyway, so we we had evidence that the UK and Scotland could do this, but the United States Food and Drug Administration doesn't register drug treatments for wild animals.
Okay, so kick you for a couple of hours. Yeah, I want to get into this. Okay, I got a couple of back up. I got a back up on a couple of things I never associated. I never thought about high fiber with grit. Does a does a hawk? Okay, does a redtail hawk? Does he need grit? Does he ever go get grit?
He's mainly a meat eater. Yeah, to my knowledge, red tae hawks do not go get grit. I've never seen one.
Do they have a gizzard though? They gotta have a gizzard, right? Or does the gizzard only function if it has a grit, has a grit in it?
The latter?
Okay, So the gizzard is a grit contracted part.
The gizzard is part of species of birds that are eating grains seeds. The gizzard is a grinding machine, so to speak, and it requires abrasive substrate like rocks grit. Okay, So these red grass and Scotland are eating a lot of fiber and they have to go to these grit piles every day every day.
You know, my kids the reason I'm asking about this, My kids have these pet pigeons. They use a lot of grit, and what they do is they get all the grit from the shingles on the roof.
Yeah, yeah, I believe it.
That could be a toxicology problem.
That could be a toxic cology problem. You got that right, Yeah.
Before you jump into like how you got the drug out there, you were doing all your research on quail in West Texas. Did you find that those parasites were a problem with quail in other parts of the country also.
Yeah, South Calina. Yes.
Well, what this has been very research intensive and as far as what I'm telling you now is we had absolutely no clue about this back in twenty twelve, okay, when we first opened the book and said, where do we go with this thing? And so we started looking across the border in New Mexico and we actually found it in the blue quail, the scale quail, all right, So there is some interface there and believe it or not, And we've published a paper on this. We've seen it in the prairie chicken, all right. So they are the same genus and species as in the prairie chicken. And we've now I've got a graduate student working on this. We now see it in a several species of songbirds the eye worm, not the SEQ worm, the eyeworm. So this thing could be continental. We've just had samples submitted to us from Montana in sharp tailed grouse and the gray partridge. You got it here, it's in Montana. And I'm telling you an eyeworm is dangerous. They are dangerous in the I birth.
And that could be what that could be those those same species of worms, the eye and seek them seem yes that those worms could be in bob we quail in Kentucky. They could be in bob We quail in South Carolina.
Yes, And then we're this thing. This whole thing is expanding now. And we've had so many people reaching out to us because wildlife disease investigation and wildlife management is just pretty much been ignored, okay, and people just think that if you've got great habitat and good rainfall, you'll just have quail. Well that's not true. That's kind of true. In certain years you will. But I take it back to twenty ten. On one of the top ranches for quail management in the state of Texas won all the awards, he lost all his quail, all right, So that hypothesis of we got a good habitat and some rainfall, we're gonna have a lot of quail. That doesn't necessarily work and so, but what is really awesome is that since we introduced the medicated feet on that particular wrench, he hasn't seen a crash in years. And that's another thing. We've got several of these FDA approved demonstration ranches and we've been sustaining huntable quail populations while the neighbors aren't hunting.
You got to give the neighbors some of that stuff.
Well, I kind of you can't imagine what I had to go through even to get a ranch approved for demonstration site.
Let's let's jump into that talk about the FDA. Is there reluctance that they don't do that? Is their reluctance that that by approving wildlife drugs there's a Pandora's box and unforeseen consequences.
Well, first of all, I've had a lot of experience at EPA, being the past chairman of the Scientific Advisory Panel for Implementation of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Redenticide Act. I know a lot about EPA regulatory mandates. I did not know what I was getting into with the United States Food and Drug Administration. They are very tough at evaluating registration of drugs. I started in approximately twenty thirteen, fourteen, developing preliminary data and communication with the FDA about my interest in this whole parasitic disease issue and a treatment. And we had developed a dialogue and they said it seems to make sense. And historically FDA they just don't register drugs for the natural habitat. Okay. So basically what we got done, and I will tell you what we got done. It's not a vaccine. It's a medicated feed drug treatment. That is the first medicated feed treatment FDA's ever registered for a wildlife species and the natural habitat that will be commercially available. Okay, it's first, and they worked with me for many years to get that done. The product now is called quail Guard. But backing up when we got started, it was in approximately twenty fifteen. Ain't got to understand, I'm not a drug company. I'm just a professor at a university. And so I submitted these all these materials and I had I thought I had some pretty good, pretty interesting data that I knew about a wild quail I knew about their behavior because I have a ranch and I love my quail. And so we ultimately figured out we could get them to come into an enclosure with some openings and feed out of a simulated chicken trough a wild quail covey. We will do that. And it took us a long time to figure that out.
And Uh, why do they need to do that rather than you just scattering it?
Because because FDA didn't want just scattered in out at that time, they wanted us to target the wild quail.
Understood, And because this was still in the testing face, it was still in the test and everything running around heat.
And so it was my son, Ronnie Kendall that helped me figure this out. With what size enclosures would these wild quail come into. We started out Steve with a dog kennel eight by eight eight foot by eight foot, and we had holes in it and we baited the quail in so they would come in the covey wood and feed out of a trough and we could offer the medicated.
Feed like a crab trap, like a like a trask got a little open and.
Uh, and Ronnie kept working and we went down to six feet by six feet. Then we went to four feet by four feet, and now he's got a technology called quail Safe and it's a third the size of your table here. It's you could put it in the back of your truck. And it's amazing how the quail will come in and feed and we can target the wild quail.
But are they over medicating themselves if they're eating too much feed?
No, we had to go when y'all are interesting, I mean I think I think you find this interesting. I love this suff but Coarin. We started out I had to figure out could I even treat a bird in the while in the natural habitat FDA wanted to know that how would we do this? And so I submitted all this data and in September of twenty fifteen, I was invited to FDA headquarters for formal meetings and uh.
Can I I got a question about leading up to that. At first, do you just find the address online? And like, dear FDA, that kind of it started out, I have an interesting quail.
It started out we did a lot of research and about who who may be willing to engage us on this and.
Were you were trying to find I was trying to yeah and uh.
And it was the Office of Minor Use and Minor Species. And I said that looked to me that they might be Yeah. I mean this was like, you know, just pull up your boots and go do it. You know, I had. I had worked with the EPA extensively, but not with FDA. And so I was brought to this meeting. And it wasn't a day of meetings, it was a week.
This is when you finally got their attention.
I had their attention then, and so my sponsoring office told me to be prepared for a twenty minute seminar and to show them what we were going to do. Okay, So I had all these meetings during this week, and on the final day, on Friday morning, I was told that we're going to have a meeting starting first thing, and you're going to walk into a big room of scientists and they're going to talk to you about this. And from this meeting, they will even either give you a thumbs up that we will go ahead for a registration pursuit, or they'll give you a thumbs down. And so when they opened those two doors, they were close to seventy people in that room. Really, yes, from what disciplines environmental science, toxicology, statistics, immunology, they had it. It was like a whole room and I'll never forget it.
They can just attack your stuff from any angle.
From any angle, and so I mean I had to swallow pretty deep. And I sat down at the table with my sponsoring office, the director and project officer, who was terrific, and they both just leaned over and they just said, get up there and just tell them what you want to do. And I literally I went to the front of the room. They were all very attentive, and I gave a twenty minute seminar and I showed them the wild quail. I showed them, you know what these worms looked like. I showed them the dog kennel and the quail. I had videos of the quail coming in and I explained how we could develop a feed the quail would eat it, and we had early evidence that we could kill the parasites. And you know, that was a three.
Hour meeting, not twenty minutes, not twenty minutes.
When I got through with my presentation, they began to ask me questions, very respectful questions and about you know, about how to how they would do this and whatever. I answered the questions. I didn't try to, you know, I just I was as straight as I could be. And so the sponsoring office took me back after it was lunchtime then and the director then she since has retired, but she said, she said, that went really well. There wasn't one condescending comment, not one in three hours. And they could have ripped me apart. There was There were so many statisticians on the left wall. I mean it was like a dozen ten of them. The statisticians could have just gone into that, and the toxicologists, the Human Food Safety Division people were there and they were all just discussing all the components. I was going to have to deal with corinn. I was going to have to determine safety. I was going to have to determine environmental issues. I was going to have to determine how quickly the drug would move itself from the body of the quail if a human ate it. Uh So I had to I had to, you know, they they were all talking and so and so. That was September, and it took about till December and I got a letter through my sponsor in office and they said, doctor Kendall here's what you're going to have to do. And when I read that letter, I took a deep breath and says, Wow, that's massive amount of work. Massive.
Maybe I missed this, but were they all interested in you qualifying the value of having quail on the ground.
They didn't. They didn't debate it. They I explained it, and they got it. They got it. And and not only is a bob white quail the canary of the prairie, so to speak, as an indicator species, they're a big time economic bird. People come from all over the world hunt wild quail and Texas and there's a big real estate firm in love Att, Texas, where I'm from, and they sell big ranches, you know. And I gave a talk at a sportsman's group and one of the owners of that company stood up and he said, what he's saying is the truth. He's He said, if you got a lot of wild quail in your property, I can probably sell it faster than if you had on oil. Well I'm dead, sare He said it right in front of the whole whole crowd. This wild quail, this wild quail thing is a big deal.
What about what about human What did you find out about human safety. Like I shoot a quail that's got h you know, he's got a mouthful of stuff, and I go clean out his gizzard and I eat his gizzard, and I eat his breast meat and his thighs. What happens to me? Well, in my in my dea worm, you're.
Good, You're good. We uh. All of this was exploratory, and it drew every bit of experience I had. But we started investigating the drug from bendzol, and it's it's been it's been used on a variety of domestic animals, and so excuse me, but we had to come up with an effective concentration. And what FDA made me do once I had some early testing i'd done with them bends zol, and we saw it was pretty safe and we knew it would kill those worms, and so we had to run at the request of FDA. And you understand, everything is so formal with FDA. You have to have a good laboratory practice certification for your lab. So I had to have what we called the gop officer, so they come in and evaluate you and check your data and and everything we did was under strict protocols approved by FDA. So you just can't imagine a lot of our reports would be massive like that, maybe a thousand pages of data. They check everything, They don't just skip around, They check everything, and so it was quite a process, like we had to do safety and we had to triple the estimated dose and triple the time frame of exposure to look for any pathological issues.
Or to check the extremes.
Check the extremes, and there were none. We ran this very nice experiment on all of that. Well, it was really cool. Steve, one of my students of PhD students, was terrific chemist and it's very sophisticated chemistry to look not only at the parent drug, but the what we call them metabolites, okay, the breakdown drug products. So FDA gave us We had to develop techniques to look at the liver of the quail and see how the breakdown products were clearing the liver and so on. This is all published and but oh, it took us forever to get the drug validation down and it required a lot of collaboration with our School of Pharmacy up at Amarillo, Texas. They had the right instrument and we're willing to work with us. So we had to GOLP certify that lab and uh and but we got you know, we got it done. But what we showed is the drug clears within hours after the birds were removed. Okay, so FDA now has designated you don't even need a day of drug clearance. It clears within hours. So it's very very safe to the birds and it clears very quickly.
So you could get you you would get a feeder. Let's say you assuming you're not going to broadcast the seed, right, you could get a feeder and run a regular old feed in it, but you don't need to have treated exactly and get the quail where you got. You got a bunch of these out and your cobes are using them, and then on treatment time you come in and put the treated feed in, let it cycle for whatever amount of time and then shut the thing down or continue back to this regular feed inside there.
Steve, that's terrific. That's exactly what we do here.
That brody, so kick an ass.
You guys are are awesome.
Then I started drug.
Up so so uh uh we do uh assist the quail with with a four to five feed with without the medication.
And to get them coming to the game.
But what's cool is my son, Ronnie, we have this this technology called quail Safe and but he's developed an electronic Bob White quail call of their covey call. Got it, Okay, now I could do that for you please. I've heard about it. Quail my mouse really dry, I gotta get, I gotta get. That's good, though, but that's kind of what it sounds like, I'm sure.
And he puts that out by the feeder.
It's an electronic call. And believe it or not, when these covees hear that, they'll come from hundreds of yards away, and you can when you when they know that feed is there, they come by and check it once in a while. It's amazing. That's their behavioral ecology. That we understood the critical component of the cuvey call, and they will come from so far to investigate that. And then once they find that feed, you know, that's like a free lunch. And and this does not domesticate them whatsoever. These are wild birds and we can attest to that by you know, when we hunt I mean these things. I know what a wild quail looks like when we hunt them, and so so it's it's really worked beautifully. The electronic call gives it so much more uh pull of the birds. And like I said, once once the covees start using it, then the summer comes, then early fall and the hen brings the brood in the little birds, okay, and they learn to eat the four to five fee, not the medicaid feed yet although it's fine for the little birds, it doesn't hurt them. Okay, it's very very safe. But once so they learn, then the little birds learn that that that's a resource for them, particularly during drought, okay, when maybe seed production is very low. And so we were looking at all of these dimensions now and so what's what's kind of pretty awesome is once you get set up to treat, and like one of our ranches is two thousand acres and I've got students working out there, so we've got some pretty good estimates on the number of birds. But once you're set up to treat, with the cost of quail guard, you may be approximately able to treat for a dollar an acre a year, two thousand dollars instead of So.
What's that come out as? How much for a pound of that feed?
I think it sells for the Quail Guard Organization. I think it's fifty dollars for a fifty pound bag, so a dollar.
Okay, you mentioned wild birds, and there's a lot of places where people are just going and shooting planted farm raise quail. Are those operations that are all interested in using this stuff or they're just putting birds out. They're they're gonna get shot, they're gonna get eaten by whatever. They're not worried about treating those birds.
Yeah, a lot of my buddy's back in South Carolina they call them box birds. You go to a breeder and you buy twenty five in a box, and you go put the box out under a bush and the birds walk out in your home. Now, that's kind of what quail honting is to South Carolina now compared to us all wild covees. We're talking about wild quail, and a pin bird that's released in the wild has a very low chance of survival. And you can't imagine. This is another real value of our ranch. And when you have a ranch and you live with your quail, you learn a lot. But that hen is teaching that brood so much on alarm calls, and I mean she'll make a certain call and they'll all just freeze. And they don't learn that in a pen okay. And so survival is critical for a quail because literally everything wants to eat them, hawks and raccoons or snakes. Raccoons are terrible on the nest and so on. So aqail, a quail to survive has to be an athlete.
You know that they found that same thing when they were trying to do re establish wild turkey populations for a long time. They were taking box birds exactly and cutting them loose, and it just never worked. It never worked because they didn't have the survival instinct. They didn't have that. It wasn't appreciated, like what level of education they're getting from the hen And when they finally found success, they found success by catching wild birds and moving wild birds exactly, and then they had that I always think of it as they had the right level of paranoia.
And another thing too. We just had a second paper just come out in the International Journal of Parasitology. It's on our our website for Facebook, but we did a study on the same ranch. It's a massive French and we were able to get three six mile transsects where we did a test. And this was the early stages of getting ready to test the efficacy of the drug treatment for the FDA. So I was getting ready for that. But what what was really cool was reported this paper is that we had six miles separated by two miles and six miles separated by two miles all on the same ranch.
Okay, big place, anybody hunting that place.
But what was really interesting we we had feeder systems out there. We had the birds coming. Now, one of the transects we did nothing, and we had radio callers on birds, so we knew where they were going. We were using telemetry and they weren't flipping across transsects. They were located on those transseacts. But we had one transsect with nothing. The second transsect we had just the four to five feed, all right, it was a good quail feed. And then on the third transset we introduced the medication, the drug, and so we did two years of treatment. In that two years, that drug treatment had a three hundred percent increase in wild quail three hundred percent, And there was no difference between doing nothing and introducing the four to five feed. That was not significantly different. We were surprised. But when you introduced that drug.
I would have thought it'd be good better or bad better best?
Well, you know, the data is the data, but it could be on a given year, might might be. Do you think helping the birds, particularly in drought years is critical. I do, But on the given years we were working on this particular ranch, what we saw is it wasn't just the feed, it was the drug and that when you introduced that drug, we literally had a population explosion.
So do most places if you go South Carolina we talked about Texas, whatever, do most places have enough birds left that that bringing in the medicated feed, bringing in the medicine is gonna be enough, because it seems to me that that they would need to be paired with some translocation of birds because like like like how you can go put all the medicid feed in the world out, but if there's no birds to find it, there's no birds to find it or good habitat.
Well that's those are those are great points. And there are attempts now to reintroduce quail into East Texas. You know, Texas used to have quail all over of the state and they they have kept retreating west and you pretty much. You got to get to Abilene before you start getting into quail again. Uh, it's amazing. So they're trying to reintroduce quail into East Texas and I don't know where all of this is going, Steve, except my data tells me with heart information that we've been able to sustain sustainable huntable populations on our demonstration FDA approved demonstration ranches while the neighbors weren't hunting. And that's a fact. We're writing that paper up right now.
But the neighbors weren't hunting.
That they didn't have the quail, and so I think those are those are real acid tests, you know, and because what our whole goal has been is is sustainable huntable populations. Because as I explained on my website that you know, it was a sportsman that funded all of this. It wasn't a federal grant. It was a sportsman and they cared about the pay exactly.
Then people wind up criticizing sportsmen to be like, oh, you just want to save them, see can hunt them. And you're like, you know what, that's partially true, well not all the way true, but it's partially true.
Well, quail hunting is kind of a religion in Texas. And the Park City's Quail Coalition has a banquet every March and they they'll have a thousand people there for raising money for quail and they can raise maybe a couple of million dollars that night. There's so much interest in this, and I want to put things in perspective to how important quail hunting is in Texas. I gave a talk five six years ago with a Scottish scientist that had done a lot of work on the red grouse in Scotland. Now, in hunting the red grouse in Scotland, they're hunting on the moors and the you know, the grouse are driven and you have you have a stand, and you got a guy loading the gun for you hand. You're shooting so much, you have a you have a loader, the hands of the gun, and you may stay in a castle or something. So I'm serious. I've never done this. I want to do it before I die, but I've heard it's pretty pretty elite, you know. And I was talking to this scientist that had done a lot of work with the red grouse and a graduate student and I were having lunch with him, and I said, you know, I just always thought that was amazing and I said, it's got to be the pinnacle of wing shooting while bird wing shooting in the world. He said, oh no, no, he said, it's your West Texas quail hunting that we over in Scotland. Look at you know, you're out with a jeep and got fine bird dogs and pointing these wild bible white.
Quail and staying in a regular house.
Staying in a regular house. And you know, that just staggered me because I said, you know, you're telling the truth. And uh my, my good friend Rick Snipes. Uh he has a ranch in West Texas and and Snipes Ranch and we did a lot of the early work on on on his ranch. But he calls it the patcheant Tree of the hunt. And it's a lot to it. Getting the dogs ready, loading the jeep with the bird dogs, and you.
Got your cowboy hat on.
He didn't wear a cowboy hat, but he's got a seat sitting out in front of the jeep, you know, off the ground. And I mean it's cool looking and and uh so it's it's a lot a lot going on there. It's very colorful and dogs were pointing and and Coveys are getting up. So it's quite a spectacle, to be honest. And we were recently on Sportsman's Classic TV with mister Dorsey, you know, he came in quail hunting with us and we did a great story and we had Rick leading the hunt sitting in front of the jeep. So, but it's a lot of pageantry to it. So I look back to my uh my, this this scientist and talking about that and they it just really hit me hard, like it's right here in my backyard that what they are looking at is probably some of the best in the world. It's the pinnacle and Steve, you may want to come quail hunt with us.
I'm getting excited about it now.
Oh man.
The main thing I'm the main thing I'm turning into the back of my head is how my buddy, how my buddy Brad can get on this program? Now? Uh I know you you you put it out using the feeder.
Yeah.
Will that be the like if a if a if a landowner, a rancher concern party wants to buy wants to try this on their place, is it is it prescribed like you have to do it such and such way or else You're in violation of the law, or do you anticipate there'll be people buying a sack of the stuff and just putting it in the seed spreader and driving down the road and see what happens.
Good point. The FDA label said is recommended to use strategic feeders. Recommended Okay, okay, because someone buys it, so I can see other uses. But again looking at it, they the FDA label, They did not make it totally restrictive. No, yeah, they just recommended it. And because I can just see a lot of value maybe maybe in a pellet form in the future, the quail accept the pellet form. The the feed is uh is a crumble now and it's highly palatable when we shift when we go to the medicated feed, the quail have they accept it immediately. We've we've determined all of this with video evidence.
So how do you get how does someone like someone wants to apply this and try it. Where do they go? How do they begin? I mean do they They're not buying it all on Amazon? I don't imagine.
No. My son has an organization called quail Safe and this uh, it's got it's got all this information on it. Quailsafe dot com We've been working with Bryant Mills in a Ledo, Texas. They've been terrific. They they are, they manufacture the feed, they is. They do a beautiful job. The feed is incredibly nutritious. We have the science on that.
And anybody can buy it.
Anybody can buy it. That's what That's what I'm saying. If this is why this made us history. This is the first medicative feed article to be registered for a wildlife species and the natural habitat to be commercially available. So this made history, and and what I'm proud of. Like I said Corinn earlier, we weren't a drug company. Okay, this was eight years of working with FDA and then another couple of years of preliminary data. So we did it with graduate students, and graduate students don't stay but a few years, so we had to go through multiple graduate students and I had some amazing students that well, you can look at my website and see how many publications we've got. One of my past graduates students through her doctoral work, got twenty peer reviewed scientific publications from her doctoral work.
That's a lot off this project.
Yeah, have you had any interest from like State game agencies using this stuff, yes, because one of the challenges with it is it's like it's a very targeted solution for a like widespread problem, like like like you said, like you fix the quail problem on one ranch and the neighbors didn't have any quail.
Yeah, that's a good, good point. This is an evolving process. It was evolving at FDA. It's evolving in terms of engagement with management agencies and so on. Traditionally, state management agencies are habitat habitat, habitat habitat. And as I told you early.
Which I usually applaud.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm all into habitat, but habitat's not all of it. And so when I lost quail and my good friends lost their quail on superior quail habitat, that the years I told you, I started saying, uh uh, it's more than habitat. And I, as a scientist, said, there's something driving this, and there's something driving these crashes. And what's cool, like I said, when we've been treating these properties, we haven't seen the crashes. We've been having sustained huntable populations.
Well, but for how long has it been available for.
It was registered May twenty third, twenty twenty four. That's just now.
And so you just don't there, there's not you're not yet in a position where you've got one hundred land managers who have gone out and you haven't yet got a hundred land managers to go out, take the equipment, apply it on their property. You give it time to work. You just you just don't know where this is going to head right now.
Yeah, and what we found out it takes about three years. Okay, into your second year, you and get in the right conditions. You can see a real pop and numbers, and we report that in this paper that's just come out next.
I got I can see the time because yeah, you got to do it. You got to acclimate them. You got to get the coffees coming, you got to acclimate them to the feed.
Yeah, you know, so it takes You just can't go throw the feed out there and say, oh man, I'm gonna have a bunch of quail this fall. It doesn't work that way. It just doesn't work that way. It's a process. And you got you know, and uh, Ronnie, my son, Ronnie, he has a website that explains all of this and he's got beautiful videos and whatever. It's called quailsafe dot com. And and there is a strata and and you need you need to know how to place these uh, these instruments, uh to deliver the feed, how to how to manage them. It's almost I mean, once you put them out and get the quail coming, it's pretty much this, you're done.
What you deworm a quail? How long is he dewormed?
For got a student working on that. They will be reinfected the next year probably. What we've learned though, Steve is on our demonstration ranches and we have another scientific paper on this. We are suppressing the cycle.
Yeah, that's my next.
In other words, the percentage of insects carrying the infective larvae is significantly reduced going into a multi year Medicaid feed treatment.
Yeah, you said they'll be reinfected next year. But like a one year old quail is ancient.
Right, Well, that's what a lot of people think, but it's not necessarily the truth. And we have data to prove this now. On one of my outstanding PhD students that just finished this spring, he had a four year project on a ranch and really intensively monitored them, and what he found compared to an untreated area and the same county close was he was seeing a forty percent survivability to the next year versus a ten percent. Okay, so and so and no wonder when he would do his fall covey counts, it was phenomenal. Now what does that mean. Well, the teams go out and write at first light, they'll listen for these covey calls, and at a given point you hear the covees express themselves with a location call at sunrise, and you count those calls. Well, if you hear five, that's pretty good. Good. If you hear eight, that's terrific. If you hear ten plus, like you're here, you're standing here and you're hearing that call, that's outstanding. He was hearing fifteen eighteen. You got me significant numbers. So we are excited about that because we are enhancing quails survivability and sustainability.
Is that a key to like maintaining numbers, is to have birds carry over to their section.
Exactly, the most valuable quail on your property is that hen that is able to carry over to the next year and be ready to breed or to nest in March April. And she's she could actually give you fifty birds. Could she can nest three times in a summer? You see what I mean? So you want to carry that hen over if you can? And so, uh so this is what we're seeing, that we're seeing the evidence of this. And the way I look at this, you know, you don't really get it until your buddies, that we your teenager hunting partiers, say there are any quail left in our old haunts in South Carolin, They're gone. And I said, I said to myself, man, that that's the real deal. And it's happened across most of the wild Bob white quail range now and so can it happen in Texas? You better believe it can happen. And so what we're doing, and the way I look at it is, you know, any I'm in this for conservation, and uh, I don't shoot any quail anymore. They my buddies, and uh so so but I love my quail, honey, and uh and I love my bird dogs, and uh it's such a beautiful thing to watch a fine dog cover the landscape and work a covey of quail and just the finesse of it and how intelligent they are. So there's a film some of your viewers might want to look at. It's called Vbob White dot com. That's Vbob White dot com. And it tells my son produced it with a team from Nashville, and it's won some awards. But it tells that story of the the issue of the quail and how important they are as an indicator of your ranch health and of your conservation ethic. And so we take this pretty serious and the family has all dedicated itself to this work over many many years. So you know, my wife Colleen has been counting quail with me for years, and I just wanted to share something with you too. We drive around on the ranch and when we get up a covey of quail. When Ronnie was a little boy, he grew up out on that ranch, and I get excited over every covey I see, you know, I count them and want to see if they're young birds or older birds. But every covey I saw, I always get excited, and I'll never forget. One day, he looked to me, he's in the jeep, and he said, Dad, why do you get excited over every covey of quail you see. He said, we got quail all over the place. I said, because we may not have them one day, and we lost them in South Carolina, and we can lose them here. And so now when he drives around, he gets excited over every covey he sees because he values it. Now he understands that, you know, so many people don't have them, even in West Texas.
I got a question about quail nos on public lands because I I see this so far as a like a private lands solution, and I know this maybe kind of piggybacks off what you were asking. If there's game agencies interested in this.
I mean, there's no way they're not going to be If it's if it winds up being effective, there's no way they're not going to be interested in that.
But then if you've got if on public lands, you have these feeders, and then with the issue of toxicology, you know, are there studies underway of what quail guard on the land has on other species?
Who knows not not that you know well.
And good question, Karin.
I appreciate, honestly Ryan Callahan's question.
What we've seen in ten years of field work and massive amount of observation, video data and so on. We are not seeing non targeted were we are not seeing non target species effects. Okay, and what we know as well, if you utilize quail safe technology on a property, you're targeting the quail pretty much. And so so again we do uh, when we were doing all these tests, like our efficacy studies for FDA whatever, we would do circular investigations around any treatment area to see any.
Evidence like soil health type stuff.
Yeah. So so again it's you know, and the rate at what we're using it's pretty low. And uh, so I I feel really good about it. And uh, I'm sure going to use it. And so I look at it and to me is I want to help the wild Bob white, I don't want to lose and uh and so and I'm looking at this. We're starting to look at songbirds too, and I think we may be needing to investigate songbirds because we've already got the evidence it's in songbirds.
Are there are there groups of individuals or other I don't know? Are there are there people who are against the idea of administered, not not administering, but offering drugs to wild animals as as the thing that you know you can you can bring this out further.
To organized is there organized opposition effort?
I haven't not run into that, you know, like would we end up, would we end up you know, having uh, you know drug come is make all kinds of things to you know, hoof fraud eahd you know, would.
We the minute they find something for hoof fright, I can guarantee you that someone's gonna be going through this process on it.
I'd say for the for the most part, I haven't seen major opposition. I've seen mainly amazement and fascination that we can help a species like this. And the way I see it, we are experiencing a lot of climatic variation. That's I mean, we had one hundred and sixteen degree temperatures last summer in West Texas. We're not the Mohave Desert, so we're seeing a lot more plus hundred degree days one hundred and twelve hundred and fourteen. And you look at all all these variables and you think about the stress organisms or having to deal with and in a climate that may be may be changing. I'm not going to debate that right now, but I'm going to say, when it's one hundred and sixteen degrees out there and you're a quail nesting on the ground, that ground is probably two hundred degrees. So anything we can do to help that quail survive those extremes, that's what I'm looking at. And at the same time, this past winter it's five degrees with snow on the ground. We can go to those extremes and by the way, Steve, that's where quail safe becomes critical. Those quail will bore down through the snow. Have we got the videos They want to get in there and eat, and because they can't get to the feed on the ground with snow. So if you go to that website, you'll see you'll see the quail. They get them a little tunnel to go in and feed, and anything we can do I'm looking at it as a conservationist and anything we can do to help sustain those populations.
I think it's just an interesting question when we think about, you know, making drugs available for for animals, as you know, beyond the habitat question, right, isn't this I don't isn't there something out there for wild sheep? And so this is the second that drug for.
Not something that you cannot something that you can go a private person can go by.
Yeah, that's it was. It was for sheep, but that was an agency that wasn't publicly available. No, that's why this was so unique. And they used the trough that the sheep came and bighorn sheep came and ate out of, and they offered them a drug for lung lungworm. But that was agency driven. So what I'm saying, and I was, I was very proud that FDA they worked with me on this because this was the first time that a wildlife species was It was a drug register for a wildlife species and their native habitat that was going to be made commercially available, not an agency. So that's what made it the journey so complicated and and to be honest, FDA was very difficult. They held us to the same standards as the drug companies and they don't work with universities very much. Because I met with a drug company with their vice president of research and they said to do something like this for a new registration for a new species, they budget ten years. Okay, so universities turn over so much in ten years. The students come and go you know what I mean. Whereas a drug company, they got a whole lot of people that can work on this. FDA wasn't really used to working with professors, but they did work with me. I had an assigned project officer that stayed with me the whole way through, and she was wonderful and so and then I had to deal with all these different entities within the agency, with all the components I've been talking about. So this thing's been really rigorously evaluated, and they made it real clear we're not We're gonna hold you to the same standards we hold drug companies. You can have to do everything we told you to do, and that's it. So I was kind of proud that we did it in eight years instead of ten, but my sponsors thought it was forever, and oh many it was rough, Steve, but they all thought she could just be able to get done next year. You know, I was explaining, listen, like on some of these prides or massive amount of data, okay, and and the FDA, when I turned a project, then they would get six months to look at it. Six months and then if they had any questions and you had to redo anything, and you had to resubmit it, they'd get six more months. So I mean it would drive me crazy. I tell you, you noticed my my hair wasn't this gray in twenty twelve, and I'm telling you it was. It was. It was the toughest thing I've ever done. But I you know, I had great students, a great team. I want to acknowledge my assistant Tammy Hendrix, who was terrific, been with me for twenty five years, and she stood right by me through the whole. She's not she's she's still younger. But some days I'd walk into her office just shaking my head. She said, don't worry. We're going to get through it one day. So we actually had a party in Fort Worth associated with that scientific meeting I mentioned earlier in the in the in the podcast drug Party Society of It of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. So I had some of my past students, current students and and Tammy and uh, we just really had a great time finally getting through that. But I've just had wonderful people and one wonderful students, and very thankful about that, and thankful the family's help. And like I said, my son, I'd never when we started off with quail safe when I I had to find some way I could show the FDA we could get those quail to come into to some some kind of system where we could we could target them. And uh and so, like I said, uh, uh you'll you'll find the website quailsafe dot com is fascinating. Yeah.
I want to congratulate on the whole thing. But before we wrap though, tell people, like, what's what's the best single place they can go to to see what's going on and figure out if it's right for their property and is to go to quailsafe dot com.
Guy will go to quailsafe dot com until you.
Get you can buy all you can buy all the stuff you need there. Yeah, yeah, excellent, man, I appreciate Uh again, Doctor Ron Kendall, Professor of Toxicality, Texas Tech University, go to quailsafe dot com to check out the work. Also, can you name the two foundations you've been working with?
Yeah, the two foundations, Uh, Park City's Quail Coalition they have a nice website and uh and the Roading Planes Quail Research Foundation.
Something for I'm not gonna eat any more chocolate covered grasshoppers.
That's I remember the nights when I was seventeen.
Men them dogs feed down by the crib e Marlborough light in the little gyming. They'll ball on the track and they chop win.
The trees.
Activase souther Ridge where we cut out. I sit on tailgate and eat for a sound leavine clyde at.
Their nose to the ground.
Well, the last of our time we were hunters. Now up from shows, now in fields, down through the haller back up through the hills. Lord, saving my soul, and leave me see what these old hounds have put up this tree. Well, now hunters towns ain't but a few left round. They've cut all timber, and the old timers died out the one shining Friday in the leaves on ground. We're the last of.
All time we were hunters.
Now he had a job for all of the bag and a shirt pocket lid. I remember saying that. And old man want said one of them when you can, and keep him good fed, sun lost lost in run over his dead. Well, Now hunters towns ain't but a few who left the round the godden mu stimber and the old timers died of the one shining Friday.
And the leaves on the ground.
Were the last of our kind.
We were on hers nash
