Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, bobwhite quail are slowly returning to New Jersey.

The birds, sometimes called a firebird because of their dependence on occasional fires to reset their grassland habitat, were once an iconic keystone species in the Pinelands.

Their presence filled a key niche in the delicate ecosystem, and their abundant numbers meant good hunting for generations of New Jersey outdoorsmen. But habitat loss spurred on by development and changing forest management practices wiped out the quail population in the the Garden State decades ago.

Now, new work being done in South Jersey is laying the groundwork for the return of the quail.

At the end of March, New Jersey Audubon released 80 of the birds at a cranberry farm in Burlington County. The release was the latest step in the group's four year long effort to show that bobwhite quail captured elsewhere can establish a new permanent population in New Jersey.

A partnership between non-profit New Jersey Audubon, the state Division of Fish and Wildlife, and private landowners at Pine Island Cranberry, the quail restoration effort is proving to be one of the most successful conservation projects in New Jersey. The project is in its fourth year; in 2015 was the first time that nesting pairs of bobwhite quail had been spotted in the Garden State in nearly 30 years.

How it works

The birds released in New Jersey are caught in Georgia by the conservation group Tall Timbers and driven back to New Jersey by John Parke, the director of the quail project for New Jersey Audubon. The birds are fitted with tracking collars so that researchers can study how they adapt to their new homes.

John Parke of New Jersey Audubon releases bobwhite quail at Pine Island Cranberry in Chatsworth. Courtesy photo by Jimmy Sloan, NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife

New Jersey Audubon releases 80 birds each year, with a total of 320 being released so far. While not all of them survive to the next year, some of that loss is made up by baby quail being hatched. According to Parke, 39 nests have been confirmed on the project site since 2015, with 117 quail chicks being hatched.

The researchers working on the project believe that the newly relocated quail have a better chance at surviving in the new area if they're released in places where quail already live.

"There's that information transfer from birds that are here to birds that have come here," said Philip Coppola, a graduate research assistant at the University of Delaware. "They know what they're doing."

The quail populations are studied throughout the year in between the annual releases. During the breeding season, which runs from April to September, researchers track the birds to determine how many nesting pairs there are. Researchers also study how the birds group themselves into "coveys" for the winter, which allows them to make sure the quail are working together to survive the year's harshest months and estimate the size of the area's quail population.

Managing the forest

Parke attributed the success of the project to the forestry work done by Pine Island Cranberry. Parke said that active forest management has created pristine habitat for the new quail to live in, providing the birds with food to eat and protection from predators.

"It's like a neighborhood," Parke said. "You've got a good home base, right. You've got your food area, right. You've got plenty of cover in between."

Pine Island's forest management plan is written by Bob Williams of Pine Creek Forestry in Laurel Springs. That forest management includes techniques like periodic prescribed burns, forest thinning and drum chopping.

Stefanie Haines said that her family was eager to help with this project because of their deep connection to South Jersey's natural world.

"We've had this property since 1890 and we were raised to take care of it," Haines said. "This is our resource, we're supposed to take care of it."

Haines said her family has had a forest management plan in place since 2003, long before the quail project began. The plan was originally written to help with cranberry farming; healthy woods means a cleaner aquifer, and a cleaner aquifer means a better cranberry crop.

"Managing the woods is part of what we do," Haines said. "So really it doesn't cost anything extra."

The forest management work matters so much because habitat loss is the primary reason that the quail population plummeted in the 1980s.

Forestry work in New Jersey ground to a halt as the market shrunk, leaving forests denser than ever. At the same time, managers of protected lands around the state began taking a more hands-off approach to forest management, leaving the forests to grow thicker. Combine that with aggressive suppression of wildfire, and the grassy habitat that the quail's depending on was quickly swallowed up.

"Without a little interaction with us actively managing a piece of property, going in and specifically burning for stuff, taking out patches of trees...you're just going to wind up with a stagnant system that just goes into succession and you lose all those other species like quail and the pine snake and the prairie warblers and all that stuff," Parke said. "Because nothing happened; [the habitat] just died out."

The project going forward

This is the fourth year that quail have been brought from Georgia and released onto the Pine Island property. There are now about 109 quail on the property thanks to the program; that number needs to reach at least 500 for population to be considered viable and not require annual releases to survive, according to Jimmy Sloan, a biologist for the state Division of Fish and Wildlife who works on the project.

Getting to the 500 quail mark is just not possible with the project's current small scope. The ultimate goal for the project, Parke said, is for the state to takeover and continue on a much larger scale.

"The question was can they really make it," Parke said. "So far we're seeing that they can do it."

Sloan hopes that the work will create a blueprint for the state to do similar work on a larger scale. Ted Nichols, also a wildlife biologist for the N.J. Division of Fish and Wildlife, said the state is currently considering sites for a large-scale release of the birds, but that action is a few years from happening.

"We're probably only going to get one crack at it, so we want to do it right and pick the right place," Nichols said.

But growing the program to a statewide level would require much larger investment in forest management throughout South Jersey to have success.

Sloan is hopeful about the restoration projects, but he has doubts that the quail population in New Jersey will ever return to its historical heights.

"Is it possible? I'm not sure, with how New Jersey is broken up," Sloan said. "But at certain sites, with good enough habitat, we can get back to that sustainable population level."

Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook.