Another quail season has come and gone. In a way, I’m sorry I missed hunting the bobwhites other than briefly when my good friend Steve Buoy and I hunted them during the turkey season when we could hunt both quail and turkey.
Though my being in the woods was over for the season with that hunt, though I didn’t know it at the time, I don’t regret it at all because my decision was putting priorities in their place.
When our daughter actually became ill on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, my wife Pat and I had no way of knowing how very serious it was until a little over two weeks later.
At that point getting to go hunting was the least ofmyconcernsandnever really entered my mind. Why would it?
Two or three weeks before the quail season closed on Feb. 15, 2025, Steve wanted me to go with him, just he and I for a hunt and stay overnight.
He’ssuchagoodfriend that he completely understood when I told him I just couldn’t do it, no way would I. He was only trying tohelpmeconcerning the seriousness of our daughter’s illness and thought it would help for me to get away.
Steve went hunting several other times during the quail season and he and others always bagged their limit of birds. So it was a good season and the bobwhites were plentiful.
Was I jealous of not getting a chance to hunt more?
Not at all, never entered my mind. Hopefully, there still will be some good seasons maybe in the future.
This past season was the second consecutive good quail season from the reports I heard.
I’ve just been grateful that I have been able to place priorities where they need to be throughout all this time. Our daughter’s radiation and her first round of chemo came to a close on Tuesday of this week.
Now we anxiously await the MRI and what it shows.
I also was grateful for our hunt in early November and that we were successful in bagging a gobbler.
We found some gobblers, but we harvested only one between us. He told me he’d give me the first shot at it, and I downed the big gobbler and he backed me up also hitting it on his shot.
It had a 9½-inch long bear and one inch spurs.
Steve had hunted with some other guys opening weekend, which was just a few days before he and I were out there, and they found quite a few birds. But as he described it, “It was not real good.”
In the last two or three years the quail population in that part of the state and in other areas seems to be improving. The previous few years to that reminded me of when I was a young kid in around 1953-54 and my dad and his hunting partner stopped quail hunting.