DNREC explains habitat protection options

By Sam Harvey
Staff Reporter

No more crop rotation — the fields yield up to three crops a year now (maybe four, if winters get much milder). And thanks to modern farming equipment, the little nooks and crannies that once weren’t worth the effort are now much easier to plant and harvest.

Good for crop yield — but between active agriculture and increasing interest in real estate development, there isn’t much space left for cottontail rabbits and bobwhite quail.

But the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) is doing what it can to convince people to do nothing — absolutely nothing — with their land.

As DNREC’s Bill Jones (Fish and Wildlife) pointed out, there would probably always be some rabbits and quail — they weren’t likely to dwindle away to endangered status. “But we’re getting close to the point where the population’s bottomed out,” he said.

Citing University of Delaware’s Dr. Chris Willliams, Jones suggested quail in the Mid-Atlantic region probably needed 100 acres of land (about one-sixth of a square mile) to shelter a good covey.

“For quail management, you really need a landscape, or regional, approach,” he said. “And the way things are going in Delaware — that might be difficult, anymore.”

So why bother? “It’s just a neat little bird,” Jones pointed out. “You always talk to guys who remember when there were all kinds of quail around, who remember listening to the males whistling in the spring — they’re worth saving, just from a historic standpoint.”

However, the birds need the cover of “successional” grasses — meadows gone to seed — to thrive. DNREC offers a modest stipend to landowners willing to provide that kind of habitat, through the Wildlife Habitat Enhancement Program (WHEP).

Participants have to own at least 25 acres, and have to be willing to commit to taking five acres out of production (or off the market) for at least five years. In exchange, the department contributes $70 per acre, per year, paid at the outset (until the funding’s used up).

County Planning and Zoning (P&Z) Commission Member and local real estate agent Rodney Smith participates in the WHEP program. He joked that he was in his “eighth year of a five-year program” (having renewed for another five years).

Smith said he’d reserved his acreage in long, 50-foot-wide sections of overgrown field, rather than a single 5-acre patch. “What you’re trying to look for is a strip, rather than something like a baseball field,” he pointed out. “Where the quail can come out of ditches, or out of the woods, and have their mating and nesting habitat.”

As Jones pointed out, there were programs that cost-shared for landowners who wanted to plant warm, seasonal grasses — but they’d found that leaving fields fallow and letting natural succession take over, worked just as well or better.

There was some maintenance involved, though — Smith said the ideal strip of habitat had two or three different heights of grass in it. He recommended “disking” (plowing) or mowing one section in one year, another section in the next, and leaving other areas untouched a little longer.

“Then the portion that you don’t do anything with, you start getting some little pines and briar, and you disk that under in the third year,” Smith pointed out. “It’s been interesting to watch it — even though, to the untrained eye, it just looks like a bunch of weeds.”

As Jones pointed out, there was some responsibility in keeping down certain nuisance plants, like ragweed. And there is a county ordinance on the books related to grasses more than 12 inches high — so DNREC has to pick its spots, and landowners need to make sure the neighbors know what’s going on.

Smith characterized himself as “an active hunter — more of a shirttail conservationist.” But he said he had no ulterior motives in supporting habitat for species like quail and rabbit. “It’s not set up as a game reserve,” he said. “I don’t intend to hunt the quail.

“Part of the enjoyment is watching a well-trained dog do what it’s bred for,” he explained. “To do it right, you need pointers. I have labs. I’m pretty much ducks, geese and brant.”

He noted hunters’ support for wildlife preservation, in a general sense, through excise taxes paid on guns and ammunition and the like (Pittman-Robertson Act). But Smith said he bought and build wood duck boxes, in more immediate support of local wildfowl populations.

“Wildlife is, to a certain extent, a renewable resource,” he pointed out. “The wood duck nesting program has really worked wonders, and maybe we’ll have some of that success with the quail.”

For more information on WHEP and sister programs like the Delaware Landowner Incentive Program (DELIP) or the Phragmites Control Cost-Share Program, visit www.dnrec.state.de.us/dplap. The deadline for WHEP applications is March 15.