Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both.

I'm your host, Lake Pickle.

On this episode, I want to tell you about the future of Bob White Quayle, what they need from the land to be able to persist as a species, and more importantly,

what they need from us.

It's late winter, and me and my good friend Jordan Blissitt are taking advantage of this good,

crisp weather to go and light some woods on fire, which is an aggressive way of saying

we're going to create some quail habitat. Is this the first time you've been able to burn in February?

I burnt 10 acres about two or three weeks ago and I was it. The weather's been wonky.

The place needs a fire across the whole place for the most part. Now you may be sitting there scratching your head, asking yourself,

did he just say they're going to go set some woods on fire?

On purpose?

So let me give you a fun task to complete.

Go to Google and search nicknames for Bob White Quill.

And I will bet you one of the first names to pop up will be Firebird.

And that nickname wasn't just given, it was earned.

Earned because Bob White's evolved to live in habitats maintained by frequent low intensity fire.

We're gonna start with a back and fire, pretty much running it all the way down through

there to give us an extra barrier, and then we can set a head to run down this way.

So off we went, with a drip torch dripping fire, we set ablaze to the 35-acre block and stayed with it until we were sure that it had burned completely through and was safely contained.

This process is called a prescribed fire, or a prescribed burn.

And this is important, because let's think about what we learned on the last episode.

We learned that we used to have a huge population of Bob White Quill and the many reasons why we almost wiped them out completely.

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