Threading the Needle on Montana Quail Legislation
A bill to designate an invasive species as upland game birds is still alive after voting mishaps
By Micah Drew for the Daily Montanan
There’s only one legislative day between the second and third reading of a bill — the two full-chamber votes that, if passed, will send legislation to the other chamber.
That meant Peter Dudley, a lobbyist with the Montana Audubon, had 24 hours after the first vote on House Bill 57 to convince at least five representatives to switch their vote before the final tally.
HB 57 would designate two non-native species, Gambel’s Quail and California Quail, as upland game birds, allowing individuals to possess, buy, sell and transport live birds within Montana.
Currently, doing so is prohibited — meaning hunters cannot use live quail to train their dogs — but if that changed, the Audubon and other opponents of the bill worry the population will dramatically increase.
Under their current designation, quail can be hunted without license, season, or limit. As upland game birds, hunting would be limited to rules established by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
On second reading, HB 57 passed the House 55-44, and Dudley was optimistic he could talk to five people.
Dudley said discussions over niche pieces of legislation, like HB 57, are mostly about education.
“Hunters know their stuff, and birders know their stuff. But a lot of people didn’t know what a California Quail is,” Dudley said.
To one representative, Dudley explained that the quail were illegally introduced to the state, and a redesignation would likely help them proliferate.
That was enough to sway one vote.
When the House convened at 1:00 p.m. on January 14, Dudley had convinced five representatives, one Democrat and four Republicans, to vote against the bill — enough to deadlock the chamber and kill the bill.
When the chamber voted, 50 representatives supported the bill. But only 48 opposed it.
Two representatives, who had previously opposed the bill, failed to cast their votes by mistake.
The vote gave one of the clearest insights into the the Montana Legislature’s machinations — on many nonpartisan issues, votes can be relatively fluid and discussions between members and advocates beyond the chamber walls can lead to changes that affect the life of a bill.
And on the flip side, it revealed a shortcoming of the legislative process — it all comes down to pressing the right button at the right time.
A similar error occurred in the Senate on Wednesday, when a bill requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in schools died in a deadlocked 25-25 vote. Immediately afterward, Senator Mike Cuffe, R-Eureka, told the chamber he’d voted nay on accident.
For the quail legislation, Dudley is now working on members of the Senate to assess how malleable the upper chamber’s votes are.
“It’s a bit of a watershed moment for Montana,” Dudley said. “It’s a call that this body is making to decide if we have this animal, which isn’t normally here, if we’re going to have it in places across the state and change the natural character of Montana.”
The Fish and Game Committee had not taken action on the bill as of Monday.
An Abundance Of Coveys
California quail are abundant in the Bitterroot Valley after someone transplanted them to the state years ago. Wildlife officials have speculated that the birds escaped from a hobby farm or private preserve.
In 2001, the Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count recorded 17 California quail near Hamilton. In 2024, more than 1,600 were observed around Hamilton and nearby Stevensville, and they have been photographed as far east as the Billings area.
“In the birding community, there’s a sentiment of ‘Great, you saw a California quail, it’s another species,’ but people don’t like seeing a non-native species pop up in other places,” Dudley said.
House Bill 57 came out of the interim Environmental Quality Council on an 8-6 vote, though only eight members were actually in attendance and heard the discussion on the proposed bill — the other six members voted by proxy.
Former Representative Steve Gunderson, R-Helena, who chaired the EQC, brought the bill to the committee on behalf of a “large constituency.”
“It was brought to me by a large upland game bird hunting group that pointed out that the quail is a huntable legal upland game bird in states all around us,” Gunderson told his colleagues in a September EQC meeting. “Montana is the only one that doesn’t recognize it as an upland game bird. That is the reasoning for bringing it.”
Representative Paul Fielder, R-Thompson Falls, is carrying HB 57 through the session, and he cited the birds’ use for bird dog training in the Senate Fish and Game Committee this week.
“They hold tight, they don’t flush wildly,” Fielder said. “It’s a quail of choice for the bird dog trainers.”
David Heine, president of the Big Sky Region National Shoot to Retrieve Association, told the House Fish, Wildlife and Parks committee last month the California quail is “cherished” in neighboring states, and the association members favored the reclassification.
“It’s a tremendous bird for us to use in training dogs, which involves both working dogs and assisting newcomers to the upland bird hunting activity,” Heine said.
He asked lawmakers to support the bill and “see if we can get something good happening,” expand hunting opportunities and increase the number of birds that can be used to train hunting dogs.
Jen Mayrand, a hunter and bird dog owner who splits time between the Flathead Valley and Conrad, said she has gone down to the southwest to hunt a species of quail and would love to do so closer to home.
“It would be an incredible hunting opportunity to be able to chase these little birds in Montana, in and around the Flathead and south of there,” Mayrand said, adding that it could boost hunting revenue from out-of-state hunters.
Dudley, with the Audubon, spoke in both the House and Senate committees in opposition to reclassifying the birds.
“We are concerned this opens the door to farming and raising them and releasing them around the state, that would be subject to its own environmental review process,” Dudley said. “With how well these birds have established in the Bitterroot Valley and their continued population rise, keeping them as a prohibited species with an open season, no bag limit, is the best way to manage a species that’s not native to the state of Montana. And we think it provides ample opportunity to hunters as well.”
The Montana Wildlife Federation, the Wildlife Society and the Montana Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers also opposed the bill, saying that hunting opportunities abounded, and a rule change like this should come from Montana FIsh, Wildlife and Parks with input from biologists.
Fielder responded to criticism of the bill by referencing his own three decades as a wildlife biologist.
“I wouldn’t be bringing this bill if I didn’t think it was a good bill,” he said.
He added that comments about the birds being non-native species were blown out of proportion.
“Some species of turkey and pheasants, they’re not native to the United States. They’re not native to North America. But still, all these species coexist together,” Fielder said. By contrast, quail “are native to North America, and they’re occuring in states just nearby us.”
Officials with FWP said that while there hasn’t been any documented issues of disease or competition with native species among the Bitterroot quail population, there has not been much research into potential issues.
Fielder told the Senate committee that adding the species to the list of game birds would give the department the authority to manage the hunting season, broad latitude that could range from no hunting to unlimited take.
“They’re in the state. Let’s not ignore them. Let’s give them a classification so they can be managed as such,” Fielder said.
If the bill passess committee and heads to the Senate floor, that means Dudley, and the bill’s advocates, will go to work explaining their side of the bird equation to legislators.
Dudley acknowledges it might be more of an uphill battle in the Senate than it was in the House, but is up to the challenge.
“It’s a bill that no one really knows that much about,” he said. “But there’s a lot of people who are passionate about this issue, and that’s exactly in our wheelhouse.”