All of the ranch cabins are attractive
in their southwestern motif – spacious,
clean and comfortable with plenty of
fresh linens. The back porch of each
cabin provides a magnificent view from
the top of the plateau where they sit
overlooking the escarpments below.
McCloskey also provides meals as part
of overnight stays and activities. And it’s
fair to mention, Mike is a good cook.
There are other amenities worth
mentioning, but it is the prairie habitat
restoration and what it means to
wildlife that is the true attraction of the
Twistflower.
McCloskey has set up a photography
blind overlooking an earthen pond on
one of his two riparian areas. It’s here the
impact of grass restoration with water
supplied by a windmill has been most
favorable. In one morning session we
photographed 39 different species of
passerines as well as javelina, gray fox
and whitetail deer.
The incredible beauty of painted and
varied buntings; vermilion flycatchers;
Audubon’s and Wilson’s warblers; and
Bullock’s, Scott’s and orchard orioles
provided a kaleidoscope of colors on the
backdrop of greenish-yellow mesquite
trees. But it was the gray and bluish-
colored scaled quail walking out of the
prairie grass to the edge of the pond to
drink that showed McCloskey’s efforts
are proving to be successful.
Preferred scaled quail habitat
can be associated with and typified
by low-growing prairie grass, with a
mix of forbs and shrubs. The bird is
found in dry regions with open valleys,
plains and foothills, with rocky slopes,
draws, gullies and canyons, things the
Twistflower has in spades.
During the ’70s and ’80s, a dear
friend and I hiked miles and miles of
Chihuahuan Desert in southeastern New
Mexico chasing scaled quail. As Air
Force buddies who grew up hunting
upland game, he in West Virginia and
I, Michigan, we quickly adapted to
the arid desert. Moreover, we learned
to pick out prime scaled quail habitat,
which typically was isolated pockets
of knee-high grass in the middle of
nowhere.
Partners in Flight, a network of
more than 150 partner organizations
throughout the western hemisphere
dedicated to maintaining healthy bird
populations, estimates the scaled quail
breeding population to be somewhere
around 5 million between Mexico and
the United States combined.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology
mentions scaled quail populations
declined 2 percent per year from 1966
through 2014. What’s more, their
accumulative numbers fell some 57
percent according to the North American
Breeding Survey over that period.
Essentially, the decline came as a result
of an overgrazed landscape. Moreover,
studies indicate that in states where it is
allowed – Arizona, Colorado, Kansas,
Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas –
hunting of this species “does not” appear
to reduce the numbers of this bird also
known as blue quail and cotton top.With scaled quail populations in
such steep decline, McCloskey’s passion
to restore his property’s landscape to
its original shortgrass prairie certainly
doesn’t solve all of the problems. But it
is a good conservation step in the right
direction in this part of Texas, where
tarbushes carpet the countryside.
Whether McCloskey’s twilight years
and passion are enough to see his desire
through remain to be seen. Nevertheless,
he is clear-eyed about his goal: “By the
time I die or run out of money, I’d like
to restore this land as much as I can to
what is was in the 1860s or 1870s, before
the Europeans came with their sheep
and cattle. And basically overgrazed the
land.”Here is dead tarbush treated chemically in a pasture on the Twistflower Ranch.This photo shows the restored shortgrass prairie as a result of treating tarbush.