Virginia · UplandNorthern bobwhite quail

The Department's own Northern Bobwhite Quail Action Plan for Virginia gives a quantified, agency-produced regional structure by Bird Conservation Region (BCR): the Piedmont BCR carries by far the largest National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative (NBCI) covey-restoration goal of any Virginia region (54,650 coveys), roughly 3.5x the Southeastern Coastal Plain BCR (15,469) and the Appalachian Mountains BCR (15,076), and 26x the small Atlantic Coast BCR (2,082), driven by the Piedmont's far larger acreage of improvable agricultural land, CRP grass, and southern pine available for habitat restoration. That habitat-restoration goal lines up with two independent, more current signals: DWR's own present-day quail pages describe coveys as still being found across the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, and Virginia's public-land quail season is closed entirely west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. That is public land in the small Appalachian Mountains BCR, where the historic covey base was already the thinnest of the three eastern regions. DWR's Southeastern-VA restoration flagship, the Flippo-Gentry WMA project (Sussex County, contiguous with Big Woods WMA and The Nature Conservancy's Piney Grove Preserve), sits within the Southeastern Coastal Plain BCR.