Finally, A Good Reason To Water My Yard…

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If you’re in the same parched boat as much of the nation, you’re probably keeping one eye on the mercury and the other eye on your ever-spiraling-upwards water bill. Keeping a yard, flowerbed or garden even halfway alive in this ongoing and epic drought is both a difficult and expensive proposition, not to mention mostly futile.

Not being a yard guy, I normally wouldn’t bother with trying to keep my yard going through our typically brutal Oklahoma summers, much less this year’s hottest-summer-ever. But two things have helped keep my yard fairly green so far: I live in a semi-rural area with a community well, so I don’t have a meter, and we recently installed a sprinkler system for our fairly small yard and garden.

The result is a lush, green back yard despite my best efforts to ignore it. “Great,” you ask, “but what does this have to do with quail?” A lot, as it turns out, because I have discovered my little patch of green has become a quail magnet. I don’t know if the combination of green vegetation and a constant water source has turned my yard into a tiny little oasis of relative cool in a white-hot sea of desiccated habitat, or if we simply have more birds this year (keeping my fingers crossed) but bobwhite quail have become regulars at my feeder, my water garden and even my back porch.

They’re skittish, to be sure. The local sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks have also taken notice, but every morning I can count on seeing at least a couple pairs and a few forlorn males wander into the yard, drink at the water garden and scratch around the feeder before scooting back into the sandplum thickets around the house. And it’s not just quail.  At least one big tom and a couple hen turkeys with groups of chicken-sized poults have taken up more-or-less permanent residence in my wife’s shady backyard flowerbed, as have all our neighborhood deer. The yard is full of leopard frogs and toads. Lizards and skinks are everywhere. It’s to the point where I’m starting to feel like Dr. Dolittle.

I’ve taking away two thoughts from this experience.

One: While I used to think watering my yard was not only a waste of time better spent fishing, but a waste of precious groundwater, I’m coming around to the idea that – provided your yard is fairly wildlife-friendly to begin with and not a sterile patch of green – limited watering and backyard features do have some benefit.

Two: maybe installing more water guzzlers on public hunting areas would be a low-cost way to help quail and other wildlife make it through scorching summers like this one.

Chad Love  writes for Quail Forever from Woodward, Oklahoma. He is a lifelong quail hunter and “bird dog guy” who also writes for Field & Stream, including the magazine’s   “Man’s Best Friend” gundog blog.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 and is filed under Conservation, Habitat, Outdoors, Quail, Quail Forever. Both comments and pings are currently closed.