Musing over morning coffee as another day begins, I look out the window into the back yard and silently greet each bird that comes in for a drink of water and a morning bath. Shy Pyrrhuloxia, bold cactus wren, darting canyon towhee, furtive scaled quail, all year-round residents, all well-known neighbors. Now a yellow-rumped warbler, a nervous rubycrowned kinglet, several pale Brewer’s sparrows, a herd of bossy white-crowned sparrows, birds of winter and harbingers of the coming spring. Soon the migrants will grace the trees and bushes busily fueling up for the next jump to the north. With them will come the birds of summer, the travelers whose journey north ends in Big Bend, who will nest and produce another generation before they head south again. I feel fortunate. To live in an area where natural cycles are preserved, to be witness to the yearly movement of birds is a definite bonus of my job.

For those who observe and research birds, the value of a protected area like Big Bend National Park is profound. Currently the park’s checklist of birds stands at 445 species, testimony to the park’s location along a major migration route and to the diversity of habitat types protected here.

For birders, Big Bend offers the opportunity to see more kinds of birds than any other national park, including Mexican species seldom seen anywhere else in the United States. For researchers, the park offers a natural laboratory in which to study the intricate relationships between the birds and their environment. For birds, the park offers refuge and shelter in a world where large tracts of unaltered habitat are rapidly disappearing.

In recognition of the park’s diversity of bird species, and its opportunities for education and conservation through research, the American Bird Conservancy last year named Big Bend as a Globally Important Bird Area.

An important aspect of the IBA program is that it helps emphasize conservation issues specific to each site. In the Big Bend region, air pollution, degraded water quality and quantity in the Rio Grande, and the invasion of exotic plant and animal species have direct impacts on wildlife populations. With its overlay of important designations, National Park, Biosphere Reserve, and now Globally Important Bird Area, Big Bend National Park is able to muster support and funding for research, monitoring, and protection of the resources in its charge.

It would do us well to remember though, that even this effort is not always enough, that some threads of the tapestry that is Big Bend can, and do, break.

In 1901 in the Chisos Mountains, the great wildlife artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, painted a portrait of a singular little quail endemic to the desert southwest. Known variously as Mearn’s quail, Montezuma quail, or “Fool” quail, it had already disappeared from the El Paso region by 1883. By 1901, it was fading from Central Texas. By the 1930s the “Fool” quail was already rare in the Chisos Mountains. By the 1960s, in spite of almost 20 years of “protection” in a national park, it was apparently gone from the Big Bend and confined to the Davis Mountains of Jeff Davis County, and the Glass and Del Norte Mountains of northern Brewster County. In the early 1970’s, ornithologist Harry Oberholser was moved to write, “In Texas, the Harlequin quail has almost reached that great destination of all earthly life: extinction."

The reasons for the quail’s disappearance have been debated over the years, but most certainly habitat change from human disturbance is at the root. The quail requires open juniper/oak woodlands and a ground cover of tall bunch grasses. Unlike other quail, the Montezuma digs for tubers and bulbs in deep, dry soil, and seldom flies or runs when threatened. Instead it relies on its cryptic coloration to hide, crouching silently until the last second, then exploding from the ground in a flurry of wings. Of all the quail species, the Montezuma is the most intolerant of habitat alteration.

In the 1970s, staff at Big Bend National Park made an assessment that some areas of the Chisos Mountains had recovered sufficiently to provide habitat for the quail again. In 1973, 26 quail from the Santa Rita Mountains in Arizona were released in Pine Canyon. Hopes were high. Surveys in the years following the release located small numbers of the quail but by 1979, none were found. The last accepted sighting was in 1983. In the ensuing twenty years, Montezuma quail have been conspicuously absent from the Chisos Mountains.

Lingering over the last few sips of coffee, reluctant to leave the parade of birds appearing in the yard, I spy one, then two, then more scaled quail. One lone bird makes a tentative approach to water, the rest waiting under cover. Finally, all make the break and come to drink. Watching from the window, for a moment I see not the little “cottontops,” but rather the boldly patterned Harlequin. But in a blink, they are gone. Just as surely gone as the Mexican gray wolf, the desert bighorn sheep, the aplomado falcon, and others unknown. A grim thought, but…Mexican gray wolves are being returned to New Mexico, aplomado falcons fly again over the Texas coastal plain, and bighorns are settling in next door at the state Black Gap wildlife area. Perhaps one day the little “Fool” quail will again haunt the dry hillsides of the Chisos Mountains.