The bobwhites are back: a vanished call returns to Tennessee's fields

Northern bobwhite quail need open ground — grasses, low plants, room to hide — and Tennessee's closing forests had taken it away. So the University of Tennessee's AgResearch programme and Tall Timbers are giving it back: across more than 5,000 acres of field-trial grounds, crews are thinning trees, mulching overgrowth and using careful prescribed burns, with about 1,500 acres treated so far. Because quail are an 'umbrella species', the restored land shelters much other wildlife too. The plan ahead is patient work: moving wild quail in over several years (pen-raised birds, the team notes, cannot found a lasting population), burning half the courses each year, and teaching Tennessee landowners to do the same on their own ground. The reward is a sound — the clear 'bob-WHITE' whistle drifting over fields that had gone quiet.

SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: institutional program