EP 560. Prairie Wildlife: Returning Bobwhite Quail Hunting Culture in Mississippi

“Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I am in East Mississippi on what I call them chalky prairie soils, defined by lots of red cedar, native grasslands, grazing area. And I’m sitting on Prairie Wildlife. Prairie Wildlife, which is a massive property dedicated to bobwhite quail and prairie wildlife conservation. Thanks to today’s guest, Mr. Jimmy Bryant. Jimmy, how the heck are you?”

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I am in East Mississippi on what I call them chalky prairie soils, defined by lots of red cedar, native grasslands, grazing area. And I’m sitting on Prairie Wildlife. Prairie Wildlife, which is a massive property dedicated to bobwhite quail and prairie wildlife conservation. Thanks to today’s guest, Mr. Jimmy Bryant. Jimmy, how the heck are you?

Jimmy Bryant: I’m doing fine today. Great day.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much for having me over. Lunch was excellent. I enjoyed that. I worked up quite an appetite driving around your property and seeing what all you’ve developed.

Jimmy Bryant: Well, I noticed you must have had pretty good appetites because you went around in seconds.

“In all fairness, now, you all hang on, she came by and said, we’ve got some cobbler for dessert. I said, ma’am that was the best fried fish I’ve ever had. I’d like seconds on that fish for dessert. That was really, really good.”

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I did. In all fairness, now, you all hang on, she came by and said, we’ve got some cobbler for dessert. I said, ma’am that was the best fried fish I’ve ever had. I’d like seconds on that fish for dessert. That was really, really good. I want to start like this for you, Jimmy, because, how old are you?

Jimmy Bryant: 87.

Ramsey Russell: 87 years old. And were you born and raised here near West Point?

Jimmy Bryant: Been here all my life.

Ramsey Russell: Whole life. What was it like growing up here back in those days?

Jimmy Bryant: It was a lot of fun, slow pace. Grew up riding a horse every day.

Ramsey Russell: Did you really?

“It was a lot of fun, slow pace. Grew up riding a horse every day. Yeah. We could travel all over town, anywhere we wanted to go. Anywhere.”

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah. We could travel all over town, anywhere we wanted to go. Played hockey on Main Street, just pick up boxes when the car came by.

Ramsey Russell: Not hockey, but ice?

Jimmy Bryant: No, no. Just on paper.

Ramsey Russell: Street hockey.

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that something?

Jimmy Bryant: And then, as I got a little older, we started going to the river, hunting and fishing. We spent every weekend on the river. Got into coon hunting. Had coon dogs. Really did that. We did that 12 months out of the year.

Ramsey Russell: Did you have coon dogs before you had quail dogs?

Jimmy Bryant: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Really? The coon dogs started out with them first.

Jimmy Bryant: You say it was quiet around here growing up, and Mississippi, as compared to a lot of other parts of the country and world, is quiet. But West Point is, I mean, I drove through West Point coming out here to the farm this morning. It doesn’t seem to have changed since I was in college 30 years ago. I mean, it’s still, it’s not Jackson, Mississippi, and you’re 30 miles from a college town. You’re 30 miles from Columbus. Tupelo’s right up the road. But you all ain’t all big cities like that.

Jimmy Bryant: The only thing that’s really changed is on the highway.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it. It’s got better infrastructure.

Jimmy Bryant: That’s where everything is. Downtown still looks good, but it’s not like it was. Don’t have a hardware store, clothing stores. Just like all small towns, all retail’s gone.

Ramsey Russell: It is, ain’t it?

Jimmy Bryant: We had a hardware store here forever. And I knew the owner and I knew his son. He was a little younger than me. He finally gave it up. So it’s just downtown hadn’t changed a bit, except it’s been upgraded a time or two.

Ramsey Russell: You got any favorite coon hunting memories from back when you was a little boy?

Jimmy Bryant: No, well, I got several. I remember, I think the first year I started hunting, the guy I bought the dogs from, we were hunting on the river, and the river had flooded pretty good. It’s cold as ice. We go out on a little peninsula, killed five or six coons because they’d all registered there, getting out of the water. Then we’re coming out. The water had gotten up, so he had to put me on his back to carry me out through that freezing water. Put the dogs in the back of a pickup. We got to town, they had ice all over them. That was a pretty memorable deal.

Ramsey Russell: I guess it was.

Jimmy Bryant: But it’s just one of those things. I just love to hear those dogs bark. But we didn’t kill many coons. Just the joy of hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I think that people that have hound dogs are as much about the dogs as anything else. It don’t matter if you’re chasing foxes or bears or coons or what it is. A hounds man is all about that dog culture. But a bird hunter’s not much different.

Jimmy Bryant: No, they’re not. First bird dog, just a member of the family. I just had the one dog. She just did everything I wanted to do.

Ramsey Russell: What was your first dog’s name?

Jimmy Bryant: I can’t remember.

Ramsey Russell: Can’t remember. When did you get into quail hunting?

Jimmy Bryant: Probably maybe as a sophomore in college. Started hunting in high school. My brother-in-law quail hunted and went with him. And I bought me a dog from a guy up in north Mississippi. Just a regular old meat dog.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Now what’s a meat dog?

Jimmy Bryant: He just points birds.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Jimmy Bryant: She never broke a point. She always retrieved.

Ramsey Russell: Was it an English pointer?

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah. I didn’t know anything other than English pointer then. Every now and then you see a setter.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jimmy Bryant: Now you see these German shorthairs. They don’t look like bird dogs to me, but they do a good job.

Ramsey Russell: But they got good noses on them. When you got your first, you were a sophomore in high school, what are we talking on the timeline here, Mr. Jimmy? Are we talking in the 1950s?

Jimmy Bryant: Early 1950s.

Ramsey Russell: Back in that era, throughout this part of the world, from here to, let’s say, Webster County, if not beyond, everybody had a bird dog back then. Was not a bird dog under every porch?

Jimmy Bryant: Almost everybody in town had a pickup truck with a dog box.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jimmy Bryant: They hunted all the time. I’ve seen some ledgers from a generation or two back where, particularly a guy in the insurance business, he kept a ledger every day, said, well, a real good day. Think I go bird hunting. Next day says, nothing going on, I think I go bird hunting. He did that every day. His grandsons don’t even own a shotgun. Just change.

Ramsey Russell: What was the quail hunting like back in that era?

Jimmy Bryant: You could go out, I could get off work when I was in college, and I could get off work, go out that afternoon, find 3, 4, 5 coveys of quail, always in the same places. My dog would, I’d turn her out, and she’d run a blue streak, maybe 100 yards before she ever put her nose to the ground. Knew where every quail was on the place.

Ramsey Russell: She knew where they were?

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: She had them memorized. That reminds me of, I got that old dog you met there at convention, Char Dog. It don’t matter how far we’ve been around the world, where she’s been, what she’s doing, there are duck holes we go to, and she disappears into the headlight. And when I get to the duck blind, she’s already waiting on me. She remembers. She knows where that spot.

Jimmy Bryant: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: And she’s ready for business.

Jimmy Bryant: And then we got started horseback hunting. And that’s what I did from that time on. And then, the most fun I ever had was, I had two or three folks in town. This was in the early 1960s. I could call them. In 15 minutes, they’d be ready to go hunting. When I horseback hunted, we’d take three or four dogs, and it’s just as much fun as anything. It wasn’t about killing birds, it was just the dog work. The dogs flushing the birds and then finding the singles. We’d kill a few birds. I don’t know if they ever killed a limit of birds.

Ramsey Russell: Did you have to have those horses to keep up with those pointers? Because pointers, some of the pointers I see today especially are big running, far-ranging dogs. I couldn’t catch up with them. They probably die of old age by the time I caught up with them a mile away on point.

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah, some of those field trial dogs I couldn’t stand. My dogs didn’t range that far. But just the fact that you can see, you got such visibility on a horse, you can see through the grass. I remember when I bought a place down here. I got here at CRP. It was grown up in Johnson grass. I had two dogs then. Every time I’d go, I’d lose my dogs at the point. I couldn’t find them. And Garmin came out with this tracking system, and I saw it, and I said, man, I got to have one of those. So that way you can track your dog wherever he is. You know where he is. And I wouldn’t hunt today without that.

Ramsey Russell: Mm-hmm. You were telling me a story. Your granddaddy was a butcher?

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah, meat market.

Ramsey Russell: Meat market?

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah, on Muff Road, downtown.

Ramsey Russell: Right here in downtown West Point?

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah, downtown. Had five sons, all worked out of the meat market.

Ramsey Russell: Was he a quail hunter too, or did he have to work too hard?

Jimmy Bryant: I don’t think he was. I never remembered. I never knew him.

Ramsey Russell: What about your daddy? Was he a quail hunter?

Jimmy Bryant: He hunted early on, and as he got busy. Actually, first quail hunt I went on with he and his brother. His brother had a nice setter. All I had was BB guns, couldn’t shoot anything else. But I can still remember that hunt and the points. But daddy hunted some, and he was actually more involved in leaving habitat, as in clearing up a place for quail. He’d always talk about, that’s a place quail can hide. He wanted to put a road up through the woods where he could see the deer. He didn’t care about shooting anything.

Ramsey Russell: So was he a row crop farmer or a beef producer?

Jimmy Bryant: Well, he grew up in the meat market. Then they started a packing house. He ran the packing house for years, then bought the farms. And his hobby was feeding cattle.

Speaker A: Really?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But even back in those days when he was careful not to overgraze it or over manipulate that habitat, he would say, I just know there’s a covey of quail over here. I’m gonna save some habitat for them.
Speaker B: He never hunted them, that I remember.
Speaker A: But he appreciated them.
Speaker B: Yeah, he appreciated them.
Speaker A: When I get over here in this prairie, Mr. Jimmy, I go back to my days at Mississippi State University, and West Burger, and a lot of the quail research. A lot of interest going on, and being out here at this prairie, which is so much different than the Mississippi Delta. To me, quail were an integral part of the cultural fabric around this part of Mississippi. Exactly. It’s not too far from here that the bird dog trials were. I mean, the famous world champion bird dog trial. How far would that be from here?
Speaker B: That’s probably 100 miles. The original Grand National Quail Hunt was in West Point, Waverly Mansion out here on the river, which is still there. Guys bought it and restored it, really like it should be. That’s the first deal they had. I don’t remember it, but it was back, I think, before the turn of the century. Then they moved it from West Point because of a smallpox epidemic. They went from here up around Como, ended up at Ames Plantation. And it’s been there ever since.
Speaker A: Ever since. You know, we actually did a podcast a few years ago with the founder of the National Bird Dog Museum, and it’s been since the 1970s, I think he told me that, they got on more than one point of wild birds up there. That’s how long it’s been.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker A: You were telling me a story. We had a beautiful tour of your property today. Got to see a lot of the activities and the management styles and the research and history of your property. But you told me a story about a bird dog. Your grandfather passed in 1963, and a bird dog passed in 1964. You had to get a new one.
Speaker B: Yeah. My father died in 1968. He was in 63. Had he lived a life like mine, he’d probably end up bird hunting and not doing anything else to fool with cattle. But he had a routine. He’d get up at 4:30 in the morning. I remember as a kid, he’d listen to the St. Louis market early morning, go to work, come back home, eat lunch or fix breakfast, drive to the farm, come back, take a nap, go back to the office, then go to the farm. You could set the clock by where he was every day. And I followed him around through the packing house at night, many a night. At 9:00 at night, he’d go back and cut him a steak. Ate a steak every day.
Speaker A: Every day.
Speaker B: What he didn’t eat tonight, he fixed for breakfast the next day.
Speaker A: Man, I like that. It was his beef?
Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it wasn’t ours. It was Fuzzy’s in the packing house, but we fed cattle here too. He loved doing that. He was one of these guys, never was satisfied. He built smokehouses out at his farm. And he’d come out at night and smoke hams. Really cut like he wanted to do cuts, hams.
Speaker A: Keep on with this story right here. Now I’m starting to see the origins of what became Bryant Foods for me.
Speaker B: But he’d spend all day at the plant, but at night he’d be out here. He started out, but lived in town on Main Street, back of the garage, salting hams.
Speaker A: Was this just a hobby?
Speaker B: He just raised up doing it. He just did it all his life.
Speaker A: Wow, what a great story.
Speaker B: He was piddling around with country hams. I remember I lived right down below the packing house. My first daughter was born. He was a funny guy. He wouldn’t stop by the house just for anything. He came back, said that train caught him. So he came back to the house, he got out this ham steak, cooked it. It was the rankest thing you ever smelled in your life. Wife hated ham for 10 years after that. But he just experimented with stuff all the time.
Speaker A: At what point did that hobby and his upbringings and then his hobby, at what time did it become Bryant Foods?
Speaker B: Well, it started out, they started the plant in 1936 from the meat market, he and his brother. And it just kept growing after that. He just didn’t last long. He was in great health in 1963 and died. So a lot of stuff he didn’t get to enjoy. But he’d gotten bored with the business because there was nothing to do anymore.
Speaker A: Wasn’t any frontier.
Speaker B: Yeah. Everything was covered by somebody. He’d always go through the plant every night. And he had a habit. He used to hang a short loin there and let it grow whiskers before he cut anything off of it. And he had to throw part of it away because it was rancid. But after that, he would go through, after they’d quartered the cattle and graded them, he’d just take a knife and cut off a steak. He said, this is free because I sold it. But he did that six nights a week. He’d eat a steak. Man, I never thought about eating meat like he did.
Speaker A: No, I gotta ask this question. You talking about him aging that meat till it grew whiskers?
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker A: Did he have a magic number of days?
Speaker B: Yeah. I couldn’t remember what it was.
Speaker A: If it grew whiskers, it was a while, 28 days, maybe 30 days.
Speaker B: He’d have to cut the first quarter of an inch off of it because it wasn’t edible.
Speaker A: Golly.
Speaker B: But it was awful tender when he got through with it.
Speaker A: How come you didn’t follow into the footsteps of doing all that?
Speaker B: Well, I was raised up working in the plant. Until I was probably a senior in high school, I did most everything. Worked on the kill floor and everywhere in the plant. And then when I got out of school, went to college. I had started working on the farm. And I’d go with them every afternoon that I could to check cattle in the feedlot and all. So I started as a young guy more interested in cattle than anything. And when I got out of college, I didn’t want to go back into the plant for several reasons. So I started the cattle trading business. Then, as it gravitated, that business grew. And the plant got stale to him because there was nothing to do. He spent all his time down there with me. But he could never do nothing. He had to be doing something all the time.
Speaker A: How much quail hunting were you doing? How much hunting at all were you doing when you were, now all of a sudden, you’re young, you got a family, you started a business. It’s going off. How much bird hunting were you doing back then?
Speaker B: Prior to that, in the 1960s, up until 1964, I hunted two or three times a week. Every weekend you’d be out with somebody. In 1964, I was building the business, building a house, my fourth child coming, and my dog died. And I didn’t have time to do anything else but work. I didn’t hunt again for 20 years.
Speaker A: Twenty years.
Speaker B: I spent all my time in the cattle business and finally decided I wanted to hunt again. Called Dr. Burger, and we spent the day out here. He said, we divided the farm. At that time, my brother and sister died. So I had one 3,200-acre block. And he said, tell me how many quail you’ve seen on this 3,200 acres. Not what you’ve been told, what you’ve seen. I said, Wes, I’ve seen three or four coveys. He said, we can restock this place for them.
Speaker A: You took a 20-year break to raise a family and build a business. You buy a bird dog, you come back out to the family farm. How had the habitat changed? And the first time you walk out or horseback ride out with your dogs on this property after a 20-year break, what was it like then versus what you had remembered for years before?
Speaker B: When I hunted, we had tenant farmers. All of them had small gardens and patches. We had hedgerows we hadn’t cleaned up. We had no Bermuda grass, no fescue, and you could find quail everywhere. We didn’t overgraze. Quail and cattle habitat work very well if you manage it right. And then when I started back hunting, farming had changed. We planted clean farming, not like it is today, but it was clean. We had bigger fields, maybe grazed more than we should have. And we had the wrong kind of grasses there. All the little patches left. Tenant farmers were gone. All those houses and brush around them. And the gardens were not there. And so you just, every year or so, you’d see fewer and fewer birds. And when I quit in 1964, we could still find plenty of birds. When I started back, I could find maybe two birds out here working all day. Two coveys.
Speaker A: That’ll work your day.
Speaker B: We built it, but it was all so fun. Riding a horse and working the dogs and the camaraderie. I had a wagon after I got a few more birds and got three or four guys on the wagon. Most of the time I didn’t carry a gun, I just carried a camera. But you know the relationships you get in doing that. I was watching other people shoot, and I was taking pictures. But there weren’t that many people that wanted quail anymore. One or two friends I hunted with a lot, they won’t even go out anymore. One of them said he’s too old, he can’t see. And the other one quit hunting because he had so many grandkids and he never went back. It’s just a lost art.
Speaker A: It’s a lost art and a dying breed. We were talking about that riding around. I think one of the most imperiled demographics of the United States hunting today is a wild bird quail hunter.
Speaker B: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You don’t see many birds. That’s why there’s not an English pointer or setter under every porch no more, because there ain’t a lot of birds to go chase.

Jimmy Bryant: Exactly right. It’s been a dramatic change. I’ve been working ever since with Berger and Mississippi State trying to improve our habitat. We made a really good move. They did some research on field borders around grain fields. I signed up everything I could in the program that would fit. We saw an immediate increase not only in quail but in all kinds of songbirds. I left where I had old fences, I let them grow into hedgerows. That gave birds cover. We were working hard and saw a pretty big increase. You could go out and find maybe five coveys of birds in the morning. Then I got busy again and Berger got busy. Things kind of lapsed. I’ve been building back up ever since. I remember one year I had one spot just across the creek. Every time I hunted, there was a big covey of birds in there. They’d fly across the creek, and I’d have to go find a crossing and chase them. The next year when I went, there was nothing. The thing had grown up. Just one habitat there, and I failed. I’ve not gotten those birds back yet.

Ramsey Russell: When you came back out here in the 1980s and got Wes Burger, about how many acres and what was the present land use management? Was it agriculture, row crop agriculture, and beef production still?

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And then, now when you drove me around today, we covered a big territory. It ain’t no row crop grazing no more.

Jimmy Bryant: No. We got out about 4,000 acres. We’ve got about 800 acres of row crop. They plant beans and corn. I won’t let them plant cotton because I don’t think it’s any advantage to wildlife. Although we had cotton around, redbirds were around all the cotton fields, but we had turn rows everywhere. Now, I think it was 1973, Earl Butz came out and said, we need to plant fence row to fence row to feed the world. And that’s what we did. By 1980, the farming community was dead because we overproduced so much. We’ve got farmers now that plant fence row to fence row. Got farmers now leaving out habitat. Quail Forever is working, putting biologists in the field to work with farmers for quail management. I don’t know what the success rate’s been. I know ours has been up and down. But we radio-collared birds and did all kinds of work here. One year we had one spot. We never hunted the birds. Bird was radio-collared. They never lost a bird the whole year, and they never used over 33 acres. So they had everything they needed in one spot.

Ramsey Russell: Change the subject. A man who has been hunting as long as you have, I pulled up, walked in the lodge today, and you were coming down the long hall. You had a little lab right there beside you. Jade’s her name?

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah, Jewel.

Ramsey Russell: Jewel. Just right there with you. Man, she shadowed us everywhere. She must have taken a liking to me because she started laying on my feet when we were sitting there talking earlier. But have you got any bird dogs that stand out to you over all your life? My granddaddy used to say a man’s lucky if he’s got one good dog. Have you got that dog that you just never could forget?

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah, I had one dog. Bought him from a guy up here in North Mississippi. Black and white pointer. The only bird dog I ever had that had personality. A pointer doesn’t have much personality. They’re hard-headed. If I didn’t put a collar on him, he’d go out and start chasing field larks. He’d get out in the middle of the field, look back at me. I put the collar on him, it worked perfect. Never had to use the collar. He just had to have it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, he just didn’t do it.

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah. He would point, retrieve, come back to me, and put his paws on my chest and hand me the bird.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jimmy Bryant: I’ve seen him on preserves. He’d go out and retrieve a bird and come back and point on the way back with that bird in his mouth.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jimmy Bryant: It just looked almost like he could talk to you.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, I bet that earned a special place in your heart, didn’t it? Man, that’s something else.

Jimmy Bryant: It’s easy to get attached to a dog. I had two coon dogs. One big old black and tan. I used to hunt by myself at night. Couldn’t get anybody to go. I’d go out with two dogs. A lot of nights I spent the night in the woods. The old black and tan would lay down for a pillow, and the old walker hound would lay on my feet.

Ramsey Russell: Aha.

Jimmy Bryant: People say, “You didn’t do that, did you?” I said, “Why not? Nothing’s gonna bother me out here in the woods. Got two dogs to protect me.”

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. When’s the last time you went coon hunting?

Jimmy Bryant: Oh Lord, that’s been so long. I had quit for a long time, and a guy called me one day. I joined a national coon hunt deal in Jackson, Tennessee, and did all that. I hadn’t hunted in four or five years. They were having a national coon hunt and wanted me to guide. I got out, it was actually on this place. I didn’t own it all, and I got stone lost. I didn’t know where I was. I could use the stars. The only thing I could do was find Orion and know where north and south was. I remember I had one guy who would never call his dog. Dog would bark. He wouldn’t call. As soon as somebody else barks, he called his dog. I said, “You can’t do that.” He didn’t want to get a false call. Anyway, I grounded him. I said, “You’re disqualified.” I was just a kid. I thought he was going to whip my ass in the field. I finally got out of there that night. We did that for years and years. We’d walk through the woods in the middle of July with sneakers on. Never thought about a snake biting you. I wouldn’t do that today. Back into it ever since.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. So back in the 1980s, you had Wes Burger come over. He looked at a lot of property, and I’m assuming back then it was a lot of row crop agriculture or grazing land. You all talked about it, and you realized you had to make a conversion to more habitat, more conducive to wild birds.

Jimmy Bryant: I spent the day with Wesley, and when I got through, I said, “Dr. Burger, you’re telling me I got to make this place look like it did in the 1950s?” He said, “That’s exactly right.” My neighbour across the street had the perfect farm. Had turn rows around, but they were all mowed, everything just immaculate. Looked across the road at me. Fence lines were all grown up with hedges, and fields looked straggling. My bike was down there one day, and he said, “Boy, that’s a pretty place.” I said, “Yeah, it is. That’s mine across the street.” It’s not trash footage, it is, but I have more fun than he does.

Speaker A: That’s right. So what kind of commitment did you have to undertake to start transforming your property and taking it to another level?

Speaker B: Well, I started out, they had a riparian program along the creeks to stop erosion. I did that and had a set-aside, had to leave it to grow up habitat. And my nephew, he farmed too, and he told me, he said, “You know, they’ll pay you to do that.” I said, “No, I didn’t know that.” Anyway, we started using Farm Service.

Speaker A: NRCS?

Speaker B: NRCS.

Speaker A: Farm Bill farm?

Speaker B: And after I got working with Wes, they wanted to do a research program on putting field borders in. So you take a 40-acre field, and you take a 120-foot strip around it and plant it in native grass and shrubs for bird nesting and all. He did the research here in South Carolina. They wrote the program, I think it was CP33, and you had restrictions. So I signed up everything that would qualify. And at that time, it was a good program because they paid 90% of putting it in. They paid you a rental rate equivalent to what you’d make farming. So it was a win-win situation, and it works. The only thing, you have to go back and manipulate it a lot, either burn it or disc it or do something. That gets to be a pretty good chore to do. But we got, I had a gamekeeper that didn’t do what he was supposed to do, let a little of it get out of hand. But I had a lot of people say, “Well, I’ve tried this, and it didn’t work.” I said, “It’s just going to take a long time to make it work.” And it takes a lot to do it. You give up a lot. You sacrifice a good bit to set aside the land and manipulate it and do all that you’re doing. And we’re still doing the same thing.

Speaker A: I mean, you’re still, all these years later, decades later, you’re still going at it?

Speaker B: Still burning, disking. And when we had too much grass in places, we had to spray grass out and put forbs in. Does that wear you out? It wears you out. And the return’s not very great, other than the satisfaction of doing it.

Speaker A: Well, how long was it between the time you met Dr. Berger and began implementing some of those conservation programs that you began to see any return on your investment in terms of bobwhite quail? And what kind of investment were you seeing?

Speaker B: It was probably three years before we saw a lot, and then we spurred it up pretty good. Then we got lazy. I was still busy in the cattle business, and Wes was busy in administration at State. So instead of us talking once a month and riding around, we just didn’t do it for a while. And you get busy doing something else, you don’t have time to put to it. I don’t think you do.

Speaker A: You have to. Looking back on it now, I mean, the new quail, the quail professor was here today. Dr. McConnell was here today having lunch with us. He’s young, and he’s got a whole career in front of him.

Speaker B: Yeah, he’s helping us a lot. He helps with burning. They did a lot of research out here. They get these grants. They got one from, I think, FA. They got money from a space agency, I don’t know how in the hell they got that. But they’re radio-collaring birds. We chased them around everywhere, and we’d see where the birds went and we’d tell when they killed one. I remember we did that one year. The next year I killed a bird with a radio collar. And it had been over a year since it collar divided.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: And they thought that was unusual for quail. I don’t think the lifespan of quail is less than a year.

Speaker A: Tell me about that research project funding. Because you said something while we were giving the tour about, they were trying to develop a cover type that would not attract flights of birds, flock birds like starlings or seagulls that would interfere with air traffic or something?

Speaker B: He came in wanting to rent this land right outside the door for three years for this project. And my son-in-law was doing the farming. He said, well, I forget what they paid, I think they paid $60 an acre. There’s no way in the hell you can make money on that particular place. I said, “Look, Phil, forget the fertilizer you put out. We make maybe two crops every four years or five years that are decent, and this is guaranteed.” We got through the program. They said it was successful, and they’re doing it in some places. But the downside part of that program was to cut it once a year for biofuel. And he planted it too thick. Now I’m having to go through and systematically spray out grass. We’ll start next month doing that, sprayed it last year, we’ll burn it this year, and put foliage down on it. That’ll be the last year of that transition.

Speaker A: What did you learn about your property after you started beginning to rehabilitate it and beginning to convert it from agriculture to production of quail and wildlife? I mean, like today we’re driving around, you were naming all kinds of plants. Did you know all that back in those days?

Jimmy Bryant: No.

Ramsey Russell: That was just grass.

Jimmy Bryant: I didn’t know what big bluestem was till I planted it out here. But we had quail all over the place. I remember two or three deals, I was riding, had some fences fenced out, and I got off the horse, it was a hot day, and had two proven dogs. I got off the horse, unlocked the gate, and I looked over. There’s a covey of quail under a cedar tree right by me. I called my dogs back, and they pointed them. And then I had my grandson with me one day, and the dogs pointed out in the fescue field, and I said, “Well, there’s no birds out there.” I said, “Phillip, why don’t you climb over the fence and go flush those birds?” I said, “The hell, 20 birds get up out there in the fence”, last place you’d expect to see them. But I think Berger told me that if you find 50% of the birds out there on a hunt, you’re lucky. You hardly ever find over 50% of them. But if you think about it, the way the birds range and if they cover it up, dogs are amazing, but they can’t do everything. Now, if you catch them out feeding, where they spread out everywhere, it’s pretty easy. But if they cover it up and haven’t moved, a dog can run 20 feet from them, they’ll smell them.

Speaker A: You know, you drove me around today, and some of the first times, immediately, I realized, like there was a cornfield, harvested cornfield, there’s a harvested bean field. And I asked you, I said, “This ain’t like agriculture over in the Delta or most anywhere else.” I said, “That looks like just a little old bitty, old-timey farm like when you grew up.” You said, “That’s exactly what it is.”

Speaker B: I don’t think I’ve got a field over 80 acres. The last two, I think I’m going to divide them with some drains. Part of that was a drainage flow. I bought this land, all that water coming off hills, it had drains everywhere. I got a guy with soil conservation. He’d been a lifetime doing it. He didn’t even use the instrument, he just laid it out. So from one end of that deal, for two miles, I captured all the waterfowl but put it down through drains. And then we planted trees along them, so stopped all our erosion problems. But at the same time, it put habitat in there for quail.

Speaker A: What are a bobwhite quail’s specific habitat requirements? And what do they need different than a pheasant or a turkey? And what are some of the intensive cultural practices that you’ve learned over the past several decades that keep you and your staff busy doing out here? What do you all spend a lot of your time doing, and why are you doing it?

Speaker B: Well, we don’t have as much time as you think with this operation here. But I’ve got this theory that you can take a 40-acre plot and break it down into brood habitat for chicks. You have to have bare ground, and you have to have something that’ll support bugs for them to bug on. And then you need nests in the area, and then you just need places for birds to feed. One of the big things with this program I’ve got is I’ve got too much grass. You want a bird to be able to see through the ground, see through the grass and be able to walk through. You need bare ground. Some of the worst-looking habitats, you’d think, might be the best thing for quail.

Speaker A: Because it’s sparse.

Speaker B: Yeah. As long as they got food, and they’ll eat anything.

Speaker A: But they’re not strong scratchers like a chicken or a pheasant. They motor peck off the top of the soil, don’t they?

Speaker B: I think so. But then, for the brood habitats, you got to have bugs, get the proteins.

Speaker A: For the chicks. And what produces that, different than, say, that thick grass?

Speaker B: Yeah, clover. Any grasses, if they just flush with bugs, like lespedeza and all these forbs, you can pull a net across there, and if you get a good collection of bugs out, you know you got enough for chicks.

Ramsey Russell: When did you start Prairie Wildlife, this part of it?

Jimmy Bryant: I just accidentally started.

Ramsey Russell: It was a heck of an accident.

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah. I started hunting, and then I bought this place down south, hunting it. Then I decided to try to supplement some income. I started selling hunts, and then I started this lodge. My grandson used to have a little duck hole right out there where the 5-stand is. So we were going to build a little family place, and it got out of hand. It just kept growing, and as expenses went up, you had to work like hell to grow it to beat that.

Ramsey Russell: Why did you start it?

Jimmy Bryant: I built this lodge in 2009. At that time, the only lodging I had was a cabin up here, and we were using it to entertain.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the old cabin we drove by today. Wow. Tell me the history of that cabin.

Jimmy Bryant: I had a place about 30 miles west of here, beautiful prairie land, and the cabin was up on top of hills, some big old cedar trees, monster trees. I never went in the cabin. It had tin on the outside. I stopped at the store, it’d take half a day or longer to go out there and check cattle. I stopped at the store and got me a bottle of milk, some cheese, and crackers, and I said, well, I’ll walk up in this dog trot, sit there and eat. And I looked under the staircase, I saw the logs. I said, hell, this is more than just an old cabin. The inside was plastered. So I went in there and started knocking the plaster off and saw logs. I went upstairs, and all the old cedar shake roof had tin on it, and the rafters were hand-hewn. I patched it up for about a year, didn’t do anything with it. After we’d split the farm up, I put it in the middle of this 3,200 acres. It used to be an old homestead there, because they had daffodils and bricks all around it. So I put it right there. It took me three years, went through three carpenters, finally got it built.

Ramsey Russell: You say that cabin was built in 1840?

Jimmy Bryant: 1841. I got a little history on it.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me.

Jimmy Bryant: It talks about what a great place it was. It belonged to a senator. I think it talks about the great parties they had out there. It had an old dog trot in there. I don’t know whether they had a kitchen in it or not, probably the kitchen was outside somewhere. When I got it, it had the fireplace closed up. But I took a bunch of cattle ear tags, tagged every log, and just drew a plan of it. So we just took it down piece by piece and put it back up.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, be darn.

Jimmy Bryant: I got it about head high, and the carpenter lost the plan. So he just had to put a log up there, and it wouldn’t fit, so he’d put another one. But the amazing thing is how they did it with what they had to work with. It’s got the sills on it, trees with bark still on them. They just took a broad axe to level it, and then they put the floor joists in there and balanced them with shims.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Jimmy Bryant: And we had a hydraulic lift lifting those things, and they had to do it by hand. It’s real craftsmen that built those things. I don’t think there was a nail in it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s amazing to me. So you started this thing in 2009, you started building this out.

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: First off, why did you do it?

Jimmy Bryant: I don’t know. Well, I was going to build a little place for my grandson.

Ramsey Russell: Just have a little family get-together.

Jimmy Bryant: And we started planning it. We wanted it to look like this, look like that. It just kind of got out of hand.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, it did.

Jimmy Bryant: Five bedrooms, that big lodge room, and a little small kitchen. And then we’ve just been adding to it from time to time.

Ramsey Russell: You all been adding a lot since 2009. Let’s tell me about here at Prairie Wildlife. Tell me about some of the activities you showed me today. Share with everybody. I mean, besides the quail hunting, I know you all do a few deer hunting. You got a dove field, you got little fishing ponds everywhere. But boy, it’s way beyond that. Let’s talk about some of the other activities.

Jimmy Bryant: You all started out quail hunting. And then when we built this deal, we put a 5-stand out over the water, which I was totally against. This little Chinaman from Atlanta talked me into it. It’s the best thing we did. You can sit on the porch and watch people shoot. And you get a lot of corporate groups that get out there entertaining. We did that. Then we started doing mixed bag hunts and started deer hunting. Up on the hill, Kathy’s Hill, I called it, named after my daughter. I always wanted to do something because we used to ride horses up there, and she loved it so much.

Ramsey Russell: Heck of a view.

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah. I said, I got two hills out there, just perfect. I said, well, we’ll throw pigeons off this hill. Got in the back of a pickup and threw the pigeons up, they’d come back and light on you. We finally used a potato gun to blow them up. That worked pretty good. So I got that done, built a little teepee, and kept working on it, getting it where I could get the birds up where I wanted them. Finally decided to build it. Talked to a couple of architects, and they said, well, I don’t know how we can do that, it’s not going to work, it’s not going to be safe. So I had a really good farmhand that could multitask. He could do anything. Being that educated, don’t tell him where he’d been. We sat down around the table, he did it on a paper napkin, and drew out what we wanted. So we just started. I got some light poles from Ford County, got them to drill a hole. And we never planned anything. We’d get something done and then we’d add to it. I got to the top and said, well, this would be awful good to have throwers up here too, for clays. So the top layer, we built it on the ground and lifted it up so we can shoot pheasants through there. We used to shoot pigeons. We shoot pheasants through there, and then we can have clays over the top. It’s a 40-foot tower on a hill, and the shooting butts are 80 yards away. It’s all convoluted, they’re all at different heights. So it just made a perfect deal. Then I built a pavilion where I used to have a little tent. The first time I did it, when I knew it was a hit, I had that teepee where the tower is, a tent where the pavilion is. A group came up there and everybody got their camera out and started taking pictures of it. I said, well, this thing’s going to work.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah.

Jimmy Bryant: Then we went on and built it, just built it from scratch.

Ramsey Russell: On Kathy’s Hill, you’ve got a very beautiful glass wall, glass window building with a lot of tables in it, a fireplace, a beautiful picture of her, a painting of her. And the whole back porch is rocking chairs. I could see what she was saying. You told me one time, she told you, from up here on this hill, I feel like I can see the whole world. And you go down that bottom and up on the next hill is where you’ve got this tower now for your pheasants. What I find so interesting is, and I’m glad we sat there on Kathy’s Hill looking across at it and you explained it to me, because I could see that one ring, I don’t know, 25 yards, 30 yards away from the tower. You said, well, we start everybody on pegs there, and they shoot clay targets. Then we fall back to the bottom of the hill. Now we’re going for pheasants. And if I showed up with seven, eight men to do that tower hunt, it’s very European in nature. You draw a number for a peg, and then after a session, we move two pegs. Move two pegs, move two, keep going. That’s going to give me a lot of different angles. Maybe the birds fly off one way because of the wind. How do the birds fly off? You were explaining that today based on a lot of different things.

Jimmy Bryant: Well, I haven’t figured it out totally, but sometimes they come out of the tower and just keep going up. They look like doves up there. Sometimes they go north into the wind, and then they turn, and they kind of turn the afterburners off when they pick the wind up. Some days, if it’s cloudy, they go a certain way. Some days, the sun affects them. It’s never the same.

Ramsey Russell: Very sporting.

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah, very sporty.

Ramsey Russell: You were saying some groups don’t cut a feather hardly, and some groups don’t hardly miss.

Jimmy Bryant: We’ve got some guys that are picture perfect, where they’re standing bent way back, shooting straight up, knocking birds down. And we get a lot of guys come in dressed like they came out of Purdey’s. We have a couple of hunts where a lot of those guys come in, dress up in tweeds, make a full weekend out of it, and they just love it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I bet.

Jimmy Bryant: I’ve had two or three people tell me the birds are as high here as they are anywhere in the country.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you know, I was surprised to learn, to be honest with you, Mr. Jimmy, that you had not been to the UK when I started seeing some of these setups you had. But in the United Kingdom, when they’re shooting those driven pheasants, they don’t really want low birds on flat ground. To them, the taller, faster, and harder it is to hit, the more it potentially humbles them, the better the shoot is.

Jimmy Bryant: I got some guys. Birds were flying like mad one day. Local guy in South Mississippi is a hell of a shooter. I said, “Rod, how much you leading those birds?” “Yeah, about six feet,” because they’re flying so damn fast and they’re so high. But I had a guy, Chris Botha, called him one time. I had an opening and comped him to come over here and hunt. He’s a famous instructor.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Jimmy Bryant: And I asked him, “Mr. Botha, how does this compare with birds in England?” He said, “These birds are as high as any birds I’ve ever seen in Wales.”

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jimmy Bryant: I had a guy from New York here say, “This is the perfect place to come and practice for going to the UK.”

Ramsey Russell: So they’ll come down here and book some days with you and then go over to the UK?

Jimmy Bryant: Wow.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.

Jimmy Bryant: And we have two big shoots a year that’s pretty exclusive. A lot of guys out of New York, Connecticut, and Ohio, and some guys in Florida. They come for the whole weekend. They dress in tweeds, and every now and then I’ll have a bagpiper up there. I had something I call a Scottish driven shoot for 10 men. We shoot 350 birds, I guess, and I take them down to the line, shoot when they come over to see us. I’d have loaders with them and let them practice. Then they’d go up and shoot.      But the challenging thing is getting 10 or 20 people all to come at one time. But if you don’t do that, you can’t make money.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. But you do a lot of corporate groups, you were saying?

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah, we have a lot of corporate groups that love to shoot the tower.

Ramsey Russell: I can see that.

Jimmy Bryant: And then the corporate groups love the five stand. Several years ago, we added Helice, and it’s been a really good success.

Ramsey Russell: Helice. H-E-L-I-C-E. That’s those targets.

Jimmy Bryant: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that was something else.

Jimmy Bryant: We got three of those rings lighted. So guys, if I can keep them away from the bar, they can go shoot at night.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You have the world championship here.

Jimmy Bryant: We’ve had it twice. We got it again in June.

Ramsey Russell: I saw that.

Jimmy Bryant: That’s not the world, it’s the national.

Ramsey Russell: How would you describe, what compelled you to make the commitment to transforming this property to, let’s just say, productive agriculture instead to productive wildlife conservation? That’s not the easy way out. That’s not the cheap way out. Despite the litany of conservation programs that may have been available, it’s not the easiest, it’s not the shortest route. I mean, you’ve been at this thing for decades. And I asked you one time, are you where you want to be? And you go, “Not yet.” You’re still digging on it. You’re still planting trees, you’re still planting plum thickets. You’re still out there manipulating. You still got experiments going on. Why would somebody take the hard road and want to transform this land back into something closer to the way it was?

Jimmy Bryant: I can’t explain that. But just like riding around today, I enjoy that as much today as I did the first time. You see the progress of things. You ride along, you’ll see a bobcat run across the road. You see it here. Every now and then you’ll flush covey of quail, see some turkey. But you know, what I’m doing is going to benefit the next generation more than it will me.

Ramsey Russell: Why is that important to you?

Jimmy Bryant: I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: You can’t give it a lot of thought?

Jimmy Bryant: Well, I’ve done a lot of things, and I burned out on all of them. And I still got to do something seven days a week.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, it’s very forward-thinking. It takes a lot of personal and it just takes a tremendous amount of commitment to set something aside for future generations and still be working on it every single day.

Jimmy Bryant: Well, every year our clientele goes up. We get more and more groups coming in, and I hope someday make a profit out of it.

Ramsey Russell: I understand. How do you protect a property like this? How do you ensure that in a year or five or ten or fifty that it doesn’t fall back into? How do you know that this ain’t gonna be a parking lot one day?

Jimmy Bryant: Well, I got a plan, and I’m implementing part of it as I go. But in the final analysis, I want to put a conservation easement on it in perpetuity.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Jimmy Bryant: And the company will still own it. They can make a club out of it or whatever they want to do with it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Jimmy Bryant: But if it were not for that, that’s what it would end up being. I just said I got a lifetime worth of work in. I don’t want it to go away.

Ramsey Russell: What is it about bobwhite quail that means so much, that matters so much to you?

Jimmy Bryant: I mean, Randy, I can’t explain all that.

Ramsey Russell: Gotta be something.

Jimmy Bryant: I told my biologist when we first started this, I said, “I want to see a cock quail on Warlock Postwitzer.” I hadn’t seen that in years. Well, the next year, he comes in with a picture. And you get out here in the spring, and you get on the porch out there, and you hear birds whistling everywhere. Rancher guys here said, “You must have a record out there.” I said, “No, that’s real.” I can’t answer that.

Ramsey Russell: But it makes you feel good. What do your kids and grandkids think about it?

Jimmy Bryant: Probably think I’m crazy.

Ramsey Russell: I bet they enjoy coming out here.

Jimmy Bryant: I’ve got a daughter that lives in California. Well, she’s got an animal preserve out there, African hoofstock. And that’s all. She still works for Tyson. She’ll retire in the next year or two. But she’s an expert on all kinds of animals, African hoofstock animals. She’s got a hundred and something animals. She’s got every one of them named. She’s out there feeding every day and just loves it.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. At your age, with all you’ve seen, the changing landscape from when you were a young man to starting again with a new bird dog, to establishing this property decades ago and wanting to build up more quail, to thoughts of putting it in a conservation easement so that it can stay as is in perpetuity for future generations to enjoy or to research or to study and just whatever you want to call it, did it ever cross your mind, or are you just too busy to think about legacy?

Jimmy Bryant: No.

Ramsey Russell: Will this be your legacy?

“But if I hadn’t done that, it’s on another solar farmer. You can’t farm against their prices. And I just can’t imagine this whole place, all this place, bulldozed up. Everything’s burned, frayed, wide open like it was. It’s going to be solid glass out there. Well, this is going to be a Mecca in the middle of all that, I think.”

Jimmy Bryant: I don’t know. It depends on how long I live, when I get done. But without that, you see this solar farm? I sold some land to a solar farm. Got money to the kids for that. You know, we don’t make any money here. I think we will this next year. I got a new team of folks and the business is going. But if I hadn’t done that, it’s on another solar farmer. You can’t farm against their prices. And I just can’t imagine this whole place, all this place, bulldozed up. Everything’s burned, frayed, wide open like it was. It’s going to be solid glass out there. Well, this is going to be a Mecca in the middle of all that, I think.

“Forever it’s going to be an oasis for wildlife. Thank you, Mr. Jimmy. That’s a great note to end on. I sure appreciate you having me out today and giving me the tour. Lunch was great, and I’ve enjoyed our visit.”

Ramsey Russell: Forever it’s going to be an oasis for wildlife. Thank you, Mr. Jimmy. That’s a great note to end on. I sure appreciate you having me out today and giving me the tour. Lunch was great, and I’ve enjoyed our visit.

Jimmy Bryant: I appreciate your interest and desire to want to do this. And we still owe you a quail hunt, so we’ll do that one day.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to come back and take you up on that. Folks, thank you all for this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast from Prairie Wildlife, West Point, Mississippi. I’m gonna have a link to them there in the caption below so you all can connect with them if you’d like to. And we’re gonna be back. We’ve got some more people here, some more stories to tell at this location in the future. See you next time.