Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

And then the rains came. And life returned to the prairie.

After a couple of years of severe drought, Oklahoma quail hunters worried that Sooner State quail hunting was imperiled. Quail hunting was substandard, and many believed that quail reproduction was low. Quail habitat was in dismal condition virtually all over the state.

Predictably, quail hunters lobbied the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation to shorten seasons or restrict hunting to only a few days a week. Some even suggested closing quail season completely, while others recommended that the ODWC resume a practice that it had discontinued long ago: stocking quail into the wild.

Owing to poor quail reproduction in 2006, the ODWC braced for another year of bad hunting in 2007-08, and also for the inevitable public demand for action.

In April, it started raining, and it continued well into the summer. In fact, by July 3, Oklahoma had experienced 20 consecutive days of rain. That helped revive the grasslands and helped produce a banner year of seeds and insects, just in time to nourish a new year-class of quail chicks.

Now, instead of another down year, 2007-08 looks like a great year for quail in Oklahoma, and thus, a great year for quail hunting.

"We should have a favorable hatch," said Doug Schoeling, upland game bird biologist for the ODWC. "It's got the potential of being better than last year. There'll be more bugs and more vegetation. Weeds will produce more seeds, and there should be more food out there for the quail. There should be more grass, too, so there should be more actual habitat."

As harsh as the drought was, quail may not have suffered as much as it seemed. Micah Holmes, information supervisor for the ODWC, said there were plenty of birds the last couple of years, but dry weather contributed to really poor scenting conditions. Dogs had a hard time finding birds, and when a covey scattered, dogs often couldn't scent the singles.

As a result, an estimated 34,395 hunters killed an average of 2.64 birds per day in 2006-07 and killed a total of 580,000 birds. Each hunter spent about 6 days in the field, and hunted slightly more than 200,000 days collectively. That's comparable to 2003, when 50,221 quail hunters bagged an average of 2.66 birds per day.

Some of the toughest hunting last year was at Packsaddle Wildlife Management Area and Black Kettle National Grasslands, two of the Sooner State's best quail areas.

"Packsaddle and Black Kettle were almost a bust," Schoeling said. "It was bad. From what I've heard, if you moved two coveys in a day, you had a good day. The year before, they were moving 13 coveys in a day. It was way down, but there were still birds around here."

The harvest numbers support Schoeling's assessment. In 2004-05, on the other hand, hunter success rates were fairly standard. In 2005, for example, a total of 41,524 hunters bagged a daily average of 3.25 quail. In 2004, a virtually identical number of hunters killed an average of 3.31 birds per day.

"In terms of five-year trends, I'd say the population was up two years ago, and then dropped back down again," Schoeling said. "It dropped back down again last year pretty low, but I would say we had one of our better years a couple of years ago."

To me, the most interesting statistic over the last four years has been the dwindling number of quail hunters. There were about 15,000 fewer hunters in 2006 than in 2003. Perhaps the drought took a bigger toll on them than it did the quail. Maybe low quail numbers and poor hunting discouraged many hunters from going afield. That's an elusive statistic in its own right because the ODWC doesn't have a really accurate way of estimating the number of quail hunters. One method is to look at when a hunter purchased his license.

It's a very inexact science -- much like accurately estimating quail populations.