In May the leadership of the Rolling Plains Quail Research Foundation (RPQRF) and the Park Cities Quail Coalition—and, for that matter, the entire West Texas/Oklahoma quail hunting community—got something they’d been waiting for, eagerly and somewhat impatiently, for what felt like an eternity: notification from the Food and Drug Administration that QuailGuard, the medicated feed developed by Dr. Ron Kendall of the Wildlife Toxicology Laboratory at Texas Tech University to treat eyeworm and cecal worm infestations in bobwhite quail, was officially approved for use. What this means, broadly, is that the FDA is satisfied that QuailGuard does what it is intended to do from a pharmacological standpoint and that it poses no threat of toxicity to the birds themselves, to non-target species that ingest the feed or to humans who consume “treated” quail.
The notification was something of a historic event, as it marked the first time that the FDA had approved a drug-related product designed to treat a population of wild birds in the wild and only the second time it had approved such a product for a wild animal of any kind. (The first was a treatment for lungworm in Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.) Plus, as Dallas sportsman Joe Crafton, the current president of the RPQRF, is quick to point out: “This has been a 12-year, $6 million project, and every penny of it was contributed by sportsmen. No federal money, no state money. It’s an example of sportsmen taking control of their own destiny to solve a regional problem.”
Of course, the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly and exceedingly fine under the best of circumstances, but in this case the gears were gummed up further, if not brought to a complete stop, by a small complication called Covid-19. The upshot is that the FDA’s review of the QuailGuard application—a process that began in 2015—took longer than anyone anticipated. There was talk that it would be approved in 2019, then 2020 . . . you get the picture. So if it occurs to you that you’ve been hearing about QuailGuard for a while, there’s a reason for it: You have.
The primary component of QuailGuard is crumbled milo, which is mixed with a proprietary blend of vitamins, minerals and other ingredients selected with an eye toward enhancing palatability and also bolstering immune response and reproductive capacity. The active ingredient, Fenbendazole, is an anthelmintic—a dewormer, in layman’s terms—that’s widely used in the commercial poultry industry and has a long, successful track record. What’s safe and effective for treating domestic chickens and what’s safe and effective for treating wild bobwhite quail, however, are not necessarily one and the same; the FDA still had to exercise all due diligence in evaluating the application.
“The FDA does not take shortcuts,” Dr. Kendall said. “They’re very thorough, as they should be; we were held to the same standard that a drug company would be. When you work with the FDA, the most beautiful word they can use is ‘complete,’ meaning that you’ve provided all the necessary data, addressed all their concerns and answered all their questions. We followed the science, and the FDA followed it with us . . . .
“This was a massive undertaking. Dozens of scientists from different disciplines were involved: avian pathologists, field biologists, range ecologists, statisticians, analytical chemists—I was stretched in about every direction I could stretch.”
Manufactured and distributed by Bryant Grain Co., a well-respected name in West Texas agricultural circles, QuailGuard is packaged in 50-pound bags and sells for about $50 per bag. The lion’s share of royalties from sales will go to the organization that funded the R&D, the Park Cities Quail Coalition, where it will be plowed back into quail conservation and research. Kendall will also receive a royalty, as will Texas Tech University.
It’s important to note that it’s not necessary to feed QuailGuard throughout the year. The guidelines developed by Kendall recommend feeding for a three-week period in the spring and again in the fall. The FDA testing was done with specially designed feeders called QuailSafe Feeders. These feeders incorporate features designed to maintain the integrity of the product (sunlight and moisture degrade its potency) and at the same time provide complete protection from predators. QuailSafe feeders aren’t cheap, running around $1,200 per unit, but in the words of Rick Snipes, whose 6,000-acre ranch has served as a study area for the QuailGuard project: “They’re worth the difference—even if someone offers to give you another feeder.” (Full disclosure: Kendall and his son, Ron Jr., are the principals in QuailSafe.)
Snipes has established 60 feeding stations on his ranch, but while this has proven remarkably successful in reducing the rate of eyeworm infection in the ranch’s quail—from 100 percent in 2017–’18 to essentially zero as of June 2023—Kendall isn’t ready to state that one feeder per 100 acres is the “optimum” prescription. “We’re still figuring that out,” he said. “You have to remember: This has never been done before.”
One thing that is known is that, compared to other quail-management practices, the bi-annual QuailGuard regimen is relatively inexpensive. “In the Red Hills region of Georgia and Florida,” Crafton said, “I understand it is tremendously expensive to manage a property for wild quail. On the Snipes Ranch [which Crafton is a co-owner of] it costs us $10,000, including labor, to feed QuailGuard twice a year.” That works out to only $1.66 per acre.
This figure doesn’t include the cost of the feeders, obviously, but given that the feeders have an expected useful life of at least 20 years, it’s still downright cheap by quail-management standards. Snipes told me that if supplemental feed—ordinary unmedicated feed—was provided on the Snipes Ranch at the rate recommended for plantations in Georgia and Florida, it would cost $275,000 per year.
It was Snipes who, more than anyone, set this entire project in motion. In 2010, when the quail population on his and other West Texas ranches crashed an estimated 90 percent despite what appeared to be ideal weather conditions (the quality of the habitat was a given), he essentially said enough. At the time the president of the RPQRF, which had been founded only three years earlier, he tasked Dr. Dale Rollins, the organization’s then executive director, with finding answers to the question What the hell happened?
The result was Operation Idiopathic Decline (OID). Launched in January 2011, this multi-year, multi-million-dollar, interdisciplinary initiative had the goal of determining if disease, parasites, toxins in the environment or some combination thereof was responsible for causing these sudden and otherwise inexplicable—i.e., idiopathic—population declines. In the back of everyone’s mind was the work of Dr. Peter Hudson of Penn State University. Recruited to pinpoint the cause of cyclical population fluctuations in the iconic red grouse of Scotland, he identified an intestinal parasite that weakened the birds and rendered them unusually susceptible to predation.
Then, having identified the problem, Hudson developed a solution: By spreading grit treated with an anthelmintic, he and his cooperators were able to eliminate the worst of the cyclical lows and prevent the grouse population from crashing to unhuntable levels every few years.
I’m skipping ahead here but, eventually, by “following the science,” the OID team zeroed in on an eyeworm, Oxyspirura petrowi, and a cecal (intestinal) worm, Aulonocephalus pennula, as the likeliest suspects. While both of these parasites had long been known to infect bobwhite quail, the bottom line is that no one had looked at them long and hard enough to get a handle on the lethal damage they were capable of doing, not only to individual birds—impairing their vision and/or weakening them to the point that they became easy pickings for predators—but to entire populations of birds. The eyeworm was especially insidious in this respect, capable of infecting quail at a rate and on a scale that Kendall, when I spoke to him about it back in 2014, characterized as “phenomenal.”
At the same time he also told me: “We’re basically dealing with a hookworm here. And whether you’re talking cattle, horses, dogs or quail, if they’re infested with worms, you need to deworm ’em.”
A year later Kendall sat down for the first time with the FDA to talk about registering a product he’d developed for deworming bobwhite quail in the wild. And as tempting as it is to say that the rest is history, in point of fact this is only the beginning of the story. The rest will be written once QuailGuard has had a chance to prove its effectiveness at doing what everyone with a stake in the effort believes it will: eliminating the worst of the periodic declines and helping to maintain huntable populations of wild bobwhite quail in the Rolling Plans ecoregion of West Texas and Oklahoma.
As a man of science to whom facts are the coin of the realm, Kendall is careful not to get too far out over his skis and make claims as yet unsupported by published data. But when I pushed him, gently, he did say this: “Based on what we’ve seen on some of our demonstration ranches, we’ve been able to sustain the quail population, if not enhance it. And if you can sustain your ‘base’ population, it can recover from a crash in a year or two, not five, six or seven years.
“We have a system now to effectively—and cost-effectively—treat wild quail for these parasites on a ranch or even landscape scale. We can do it! A decade ago we didn’t know how in the world we’d do something like that
“I’m not saying we know everything, but I am saying that we can kill these parasites and that we can do it without hurting the birds.”
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