North Carolina’s effort to restore quail, the CURE (Cooperative Upland habitat Restoration and Enhancement) program, has attempted since 2001 to change large-scale landscape management practices in several areas to benefit small-game species, including songbirds, butterflies and several species of amphibians and reptiles.
But CURE’s main target always has been bobwhite quail.
The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission created three CURE cooperative areas. The agency got landowners to sign on to the program that hopefully will change farming practices to be more amenable to quail.
CURE’s original geographic areas include the northern coastal plain (Halifax and Northampton counties), the southern coastal plain (around Rowland in Robeson County) and the western piedmont (near Turnersburg in Iredell County).
Landowners who signed on to the program have been taught to thin forests, use prescribed burning, create field borders, control hardwood encroachment and convert pasture and hay fields from fescue to native grasses.
Parts of four game lands totaling 21,456 acres were designated as CURE focal areas: Caswell, Sandhills, South Mountains and Suggs Mill Pond.
Results, however, have been spotty. If wild quail don’t live on the private lands that surround game lands, there will be no birds to migrate onto the CURE-managed game lands. That’s why cooperation from private landowners near game lands is so important.
The Commission said the main drawback has been a lack of agency funding to encourage private landowners to make CURE changes.
