Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Rolling Plains Bobwhite Brigade


Bobwhite quail female on left the male is on the right
Recently, I have been in Coleman County, Texas; attending the Bobwhite Brigade. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Texas Brigade camps, they are a five and a half day camp that teaches about conservation, management, habitat evaluation, and leadership skills.

I chose to attend the Rolling Plains Bobwhite Brigade; because there used to be quail in our area and since I show quail in 4-H. In this post, I am just going to tell by favorite parts that way future cadets can be surprised.

Mock Stakeholder Group.
My favorite activity at camp was a mock stakeholders meeting, where different coveys (groups of cadets) were assigned a organization to represent that would be speaking at a stakeholders meeting. My covey represented Quit Underwriting All Inhumane Leisure or Q.U.A.I.L. for short. Our main points were that only little of quail is eaten, they will soon become threatened like the buffalo and horned toad (we found out that this was false later on), and that hunters were barbaric butchers. What made our topic fun was that we could be fake extremists and could try to get kicked out of the meeting. We made posters, tied ourselves to chairs, and rocked back and forth chanting. The purpose of this was to see different people's opinions on quail hunting, and conservation.

Learning about trail cameras
 

Another activity I enjoyed, was taking a pretest and a posttest on quail, plants, and information on quail. This really proved to me how much I learned. On the pretest, I only knew the names of two quail plants, mesquite and croton. On the posttest, I was able to identify all of the plants in the test.


If you raise quail, hunt quail, like quail, or if just want to learn more about wildlife, I would highly recommend the Brigade program. It is really fun, and it provides you with information that will come in handy when discussing quail. Also, the brigades help you become a better, speaker as well as a leader. If you have any questions, please let me know.