This book presents the results and conclusions of the longest continuous study ever undertaken for a local North American game bird population.
Since 1950 abundance has been determined seasonally by direct count, nesting ecology by field searches and observation, and hunting pressure and harvest by field interviews. Land use and weather conditions also have been recorded. The period of the study saw considerable change in regional land use and included several of the most severe winters in recorded weather history.
Continuing harvest of the study population did not have a progressively depressing effect on standing densities; rather it held breeding stock somewhat below K at a more productive point on the growth curve. Roseberry and Klimstra report that there was clear evidence of an 8 to 10-year cycle within the study population. They found after examining a number of cycle theories that a close temporal relationship existed between their bobwhite data and the nodal lunar cycle described by Archibald (1977).
Sound field techniques, long-term data acquisition, and appropriate mathematical and statistical treatment of the data combine to provide a significant contribution to what is known of not only bobwhite but basic population ecology.
John L. Roseberry is a researcher in the Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory, Southern Illinois University. He received the Wildlife Society’s 1980 Wildlife Publication Award for his article, “Bobwhite Population Responses to Exploitation: Real and Simulated.”
Willard D. Klimstra is Professor of Zoology and Director, Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
This review is from: Population Ecology of the Bobwhite (Hardcover)
Population Ecology of the Bobwhite is the best technical treatise on bobwhites that has been written. The book provides a thorough and scholarly exposition of basic life history and management as well as a detailed, cutting-edge analysis of populations dynamics and harvest management. When I like books a lot, the books are highlighted, underlined, starred, and exclamation-pointed. My copy of Roseberry and Klimstra's book is a mess, but that's because it contains so much useful information that I have flagged in one way or another.
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