
Bobwhites are returning to public lands in the Carolinas
Keeping a keen eye on his dog, Darron Monroe walked along a power line right-of-way. Composed of broom sedge and low brush, the vegetation had not been mowed or treated with herbicides for a couple of years.
“This is the type of habitat where I have been finding quail,” he said. “When you hunt on game lands, natural cover like this is where they are because there are very few planted fields to attract and hold them.”
Monroe lives in Wilmington, and has hunted quail for 5 years. To say he loves bird dogs and teaching them to hunt wild game birds is an understatement. The time he spends in the field each hunting season with his dogs, as well as helping other hunters and their dogs, numbers in months, not days. He typically hunts six days per week during woodcock and quail season. The rest of the year, he teaches obedience training to dogs and their owners through his business, Good Boy Dog Training (252-341-6876).
“We average finding one or two coveys per day,” he said. “I hunt Holly Shelter, Green Swamp, Juniper Creek, Stones Creek, Sandhills and many other North Carolina game lands. I find quail on all of them when I find the right habitat, although some have more birds than others. Some areas look great and have high quail numbers in summer, but the birds seem to disappear before or during hunting season.”
He began hunting quail in 2020. His daughter, Marilyn Monroe, talked him into getting Brute, a German shorthaired pointer puppy.
It’s a passion
“When Brute started pointing butterflies, I wondered what he was doing,” he said. “I watched a podcast by a guy in Georgia who had a history of bird dogs and bird dog training. But another friend told me there weren’t any wild birds. Being naïve and arrogant, I went out every day until I became obsessed. At the end of February 2021, I finally killed my first quail and was overwhelmed with emotion. The dog pointed. The birds went up under my feet. I shot both barrels and hit one bird. Everything was just like we had been training for in the yard. When the dog came to my side and dropped the bird in my hand, I cried.”
Monroe had owned a marketing firm and had to close it. Reinventing himself, he decided hunting and dog training would be his new career. He kept finding quail and marking flush locations on the phone app onX. Two seasons ago, he hunted 71 days and located 23 coveys. Now, he is finding one or two coveys almost every day.
“Finding woodcock is more consistent,” he said. “So, I guide hunters who want to hunt woodcock during woodcock season with my dogs or theirs. But quail are difficult to find, so I don’t actually guide for quail. Rather, I take quail hunters who need me to coordinate themselves with their dogs. I teach them to work together as a team so they will be able to have success in the field. We may find quail during the process, but it’s more training than hunting.”
For example, he shows a hunter how to approach a covey their dog has pointed so they can make the flush and have the opportunity of making a shot. A wild flush is the rule rather than the exception, but happens more often to hunters who don’t know how to approach a point.
“Hunters want the picture-perfect scenario, with the dog on point. It’s easy to do on a shooting preserve with pen-raised quail, but wild quail are wary of predators. If a dog is relocating a covey, I am fine with that. The dog will eventually stop whenever the birds stop. You may think the dog is making false points, but the birds are just moving. You can ruin a dog by destroying his confidence if you don’t let the dog work out what the covey is doing. While he’s doing that, you have to anticipate a wild flush. The dog may be on point when you are walking up. You get within 20 yards and the covey gets up. It may be your only chance, so you had better be ready to shoot.”
It’s not a field trial
Trying to make his mind up about his favorite breed, Monroe has a German shorthair, a German wirehaired pointer, a Brittany spaniel, an English pointer and a Labrador retriever. Interested more in training dogs than bagging birds, he now carries a single-barrel .410. He doesn’t train his dogs to be steady on the flush, but lets them go at the shot so they are able to pick downed birds up quickly.

“If I was running dogs in field trials, I would train steadiness,” he said. “But I am hunting. We drop each dog for 30 minutes and keep rotating them, starting around 8:30 a.m., and keep moving to different locations all day. After I hunt an area several times, I can tell if we are finding the same covey by dropping pins on the onX app. Then I can look for them in the same spots where I have seen them at certain times of the day.”
Walk the briars
To find new territory, he looks for the same type of cover where he has been finding quail at certain times of the day. A complicating factor is that a covey may routinely occur in a specific area at a certain time and place but disappear the following season. The phenomenon can be due to a drastic habitat change, such as a timbering operation or a power-line right-of-way that has been mowed. Flooding may move a covey out of a thick Carolina Bay onto open uplands, then a dry weather spell allows them to move back into cover so dense that a dog and hunter cannot find them.
“At end of season there are fewer birds, they are more wary and they stick to denser cover,” he said. “That’s when I look for birds in open savannahs beneath burned longleaf pines. The best spots have managed longleaf pines that are less than 6-years-old. The shooting is tough, but if it’s not hard to walk through the cover, you aren’t going to find quail. You had better be in briars all day. Most hunters cannot walk 6 to 8 miles a day in that type of cover. But that’s what it takes to find a covey or two.”
Key to hunters finding more quail is the NCWRC’s current emphasis on creating and maintaining early successional habitat. At a rapid rate, thousands of acres of game land uplands have been clearcut and replanted with longleaf pines, which creates excellent quail habitat. During later growth stages, the longleaf stands are subjected to periodic prescribed burns that perpetuate quail habitat by allowing grasses and other beneficial understory vegetation to thrive.
“Quail hunting is a great way to get in shape,” he said. “We have all of these sporting breeds, yet most dogs are pets. So we don’t take advantage of what they are bred to do. It’s one thing to play fetch with your dog. It’s another to hunt a beautiful pine savannah with your pet, who is also your best friend, and help him live out his best life. It’s man and wolf and prey, one of the most perfect combinations found in nature.”
Bionic bobwhites
Advances in technology are making hunting bobwhites easier. In the past, hunters kept notebooks, jotting down the dates, times and places where they found coveys. They also navigated by and marked covey locations on paper maps. Now applications such as onX do the same thing, but with satellite map views of cover types, land ownership and other features built into the program.
Once upon a time, hunters had to actually tromp through cover or walk long distances beyond a locked trailhead gate on public land to see what a potential field opening or pine plantation actually looked like. Now, it can be accomplished by looking at a satellite view.
Another efficiency boost is through electronic dog collars. In the past, when their dogs were hunting in dense cover, hunters kept track of them by putting bells on their collars. When the bell stopped tinkling, the dog was on point. But then, they had to find the dog without the aid of the bell.
Electronic collars now have beepers that accomplish the same thing. But they also have GPS tracking features, so dogs on point or ranging far are easy to locate. And they have electric stimulation features to assist in training. They reinforce trained traits such as steadiness on point, steadiness to wing and shot and obedience commands like come, sit and heel.
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