Upland Game Bird Management Account Projects

This project will develop a workflow for processing existing audio data to develop mountain quail occupancy and abundance estimates and trends from 2010- 2021. This information is important to inform data driven Mountain Quail management approaches, including setting harvest quotas and guiding habitat management and restoration.

The California Conservation Genomics Project has whole genome sequences from 29 California samples of Mountain Quail. This project will generate additional quail whole genome sequences in priority areas to guide management in California.

The goal of this project is to provide a quantitative basis for prioritizing areas for quail population and habitat conservation on a state-wide basis for California. To achieve this, we will use a hierarchical approach with three spatial scales: state, county, and home range to link the broad-scale population dynamics of three species of wild quail in California to statewide landscape and monitoring metrics.

The ring-necked pheasant is one of California’s most prized game birds, but hunter success and harvest has greatly declined. A comprehensive assessment of the pheasant population status and possible factors related to population trends in California has not been conducted in nearly 25 years. This information is needed to guide management of pheasant populations and their habitats in California.

Habitat use of ruffed grouse in California is only known from anecdotal or descriptive studies.The proposed project would generate a species distribution model (SDM) and conduct pilot field sampling and trend monitoring program design, covering the statewide distribution of Ruffed Grouse in California, in Del Norte, Humboldt, Mendocino, Siskiyou, Trinity, Tehama, and Shasta Counties.

This study will include field operations, data collection, and analytical approaches aimed at answering basic questions regarding upland game bird populations including pheasants and turkeys.

Assessment of Mountain Quail abundance and critical habitat is hindered by the lack of practical and efficient methods for counting birds and measuring dense, frequently impenetrable, chaparral vegetation. The Game Bird Research Group proposes to quantify the temporal patterns of Mountain Quail vocalizations that underpin abundance estimates derived from call counts.

In this project, Game Bird Research Group proposes to attain accurate coordinate locations for a sample of territorial male Sooty Grouse throughout Mendocino, Glenn, Lake, and Sonoma counties and use them to create a habitat suitability model that predicts the locations of additional breeding sites throughout the region.

We propose to develop a monitoring strategy for quail and dove species residing in the Sonoran, Colorado, and Mohave Deserts, the Great Basin and other arid highland ecosystems where large scale habitat monitoring programs (AIM and NRI) are operational.

This project will conduct a comprehensive evaluation of available information on pheasants and factors possibly related to population dynamics, and where data are adequate, will evaluate the relationship between pheasant populations and possible limiting factors.