In 1956 the brothers moved to Arizona and started a taxidermy business. “I’d always been charmed by them,” he says. He’d been captivated by birds since age six, when he’d walk with his older brother, Seymour, to a park along Lake Michigan-sometimes skipping school-to watch flocks of multihued migratory birds that rested and fed there. It stayed in the annals of vanished birds until the 1960s, when Jim Levy rediscovered it. By the 1950s Masked Bobwhite, classified as a subspecies of Northern Bobwhite in 1944, seemed to have disappeared entirely. They brought their quarry north, and some attempted to seed new populations in Arizona and New Mexico. It was presumed extinct in the United States by the 1920s, but for a couple dozen years, conservationists, game breeders, and ornithologists occasionally still captured the elusive quail in Sonora, Mexico. A mere two decades later, he noted its scarcity: “One of the rare, if not the rarest, native birds in Arizona today is the Masked Bob-white.” By the early 1900s it had vanished from parts of its vast Sonoran Desert home, along with the lush grasslands, degraded by drought and cattle. Ioneering ornithologist Herbert Brown first wrote about the Masked Bobwhite in 1884. But from here on, this small brood-along with other bobwhites roaming the refuge-is on its own. The team will track the birds via the dad’s radio collar and with visual counts, monitoring from a distance. Johnson retrieves the box, and the humans leave. Within minutes the Northern Bobwhite has herded his wards under the canopy of twisted branches and fern-like foliage. The foster dad in the wash jumps right into his role. And they steer them under dense scrub for protection from predators like coyotes and the boiling midday sun. (While the chicks don’t know the difference, Northern males have a white throat and eyebrow, whereas Masked males have a mostly black head.) These surrogate dads teach naive youngsters how to find grasshoppers, beetles, and other food sources. These supplemental resources might make the difference between life and death for the birds in the wild-especially amid increasingly scant rainfall and record triple-digit temperatures.īiologists also give the chicks a leg up by releasing them with a foster parent-often a wild Northern Bobwhite, a close relative of the Masked Bobwhite. The release sites, for instance, are carefully chosen, says FWS quail biologist Rebecca Chester: “We try to put them in some of the best cover and in the best shade so that once they kind of get their wits about them over the first day or two, they can start to venture out from there.” The team also sets up water containers and feeders and scatters milo and millet seeds beneath shrubs and low trees. Still, the team does everything it can to increase the birds’ odds of survival. “It told us that at some level these birds have what it takes.” Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who leads the recovery team. It’s a huge milestone, says Lacrecia Johnson, the U.S. An early-2020 count put the Buenos Aires population, the world’s only known wild Masked Bobwhites, at about 200 individuals. A fraction have survived, and, to the delight of federal biologists, some of the survivors have reproduced. Since 2018 the recovery team has released some 1,800 chicks on the refuge, including about 700 let loose last year. In 1985 the government set aside more than 100,000 acres of flat plains, rolling grassland hills, and oak-lined canyons specifically to conserve the gregarious quail. The chick release today is a key part of a revamped program that aims to reestablish a wild population in southern Arizona, at the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. The critically endangered bird, native to southern Arizona and northern Mexico, is the focus of a decades-long recovery effort that, after many fits and starts, is finally showing signs of promise. These birds, taking their first, tentative steps in their new home, are Masked Bobwhites-quail once thought extinct that are now poised to reclaim this patch of their historical range after a century-long absence. Soon about a dozen tiny, speckled chicks bumble and wobble out into the clearing. Then they quietly make their way over to a small group of people on the edge of the wash and stand like silent sentinels, not wanting to frighten the rare creatures inside. They set it down in an arid wash thick with mesquite trees and slide open a door on one side. Between them they carry a wooden box punctuated with round breathing holes. The sun scorches a stretch of Arizona desert as two women stride through clumps of golden grass, dodging prickly pear cacti on a late morning in September.
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