New York newspaperman Horace Greeley once urged those in early adulthood who sought to make their fortunes to heed this advice: "Go West, young man."

Greeley's words were written in an era during which western North America was an expanding frontier with lots of opportunities for advancement. But the noted journalist's counsel is just as appropriate today -- for Oklahoma quail hunters!

True, at least some quail will be found in all parts of the state. I just spent a weekend camped on a creekbank in far Southeastern Oklahoma. There I heard bobwhites whistling in the early-morning light in a pasture just across the creek.

But if you want to find lots of quail, Western Oklahoma -- and especially northwestern Oklahoma -- is where you want to be.

I grew up in northwestern Oklahoma, and was spoiled in my younger years by being able to grab a shotgun after school and just walk the fields at the edge of town. With or without a bird dog, I could shoot a limit of quail. Quail were so abundant then that we rarely chased singles unless we saw them land really close by. No reason to: We knew that we wouldn't have to walk far to find another covey.

I don't know of a place where you can still get that kind of easy action anymore. Nowadays, you pretty much have to have a big tract or tracts of land to hunt. And you'd better have one or more really good dogs and be able to walk several miles a day if you even plan to get close to a limit of bobwhites.

But it still happens. My 18-year-old son Hawk and his friend Jon Mann, from Arnett, bagged their limit one day last fall as they hunted over my single Brittany on lands owned by Mann's family and friends.

But I haven't killed a daily limit of quail in several years, even though I've tried. More often, my friends and I wind up with two or three birds, or, if we're lucky, five or six birds each after several hours of hunting.

Of course, it could be that my shooting skills haven't held up as well as they might have. On my last day of quail hunting last year I missed nearly everything I shot at. In my defense, the birds were flushing wild, and most of our shots were long ones. But there was a time when I would have filled my bag, even under those conditions.

But I'm straying from the subject: the best sites for hunting quail in Oklahoma these days.

Even if you haven't donned a pair of hunting boots in several years, and so don't have a lot of current first-hand knowledge, you have only to look at the annual hunting/harvest statistics compiled by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conser-vation to see where most of the birds are killed these days.

The department surveys hunters and gets information in order that statistical data can be compiled and analyzed each year. As you might guess, the process takes several months, so at this writing, the most recent statistics available are from the 2004-05 quail season. They pretty much mirror the results of the previous year's season -- and I'll bet they're not much different from last fall's results, either.

What they show is that more than three-fourths of the quail harvest takes place in the western third of the state. Nearly half of the harvest came from a single region -- northwest Oklahoma.