Catherine Rideout, the official liaison between the National Bobwhite Technical Committee (NBTC) and Partners in Flight (PIF) since 2012 (the longest serving non-quail conservation organization representative in NBTC Steering Committee history) received the 2018 NBTC Leadership Award during the NBTC annual meeting in Albany, GA, recently.
Rideout joined NBTC (then the Southeast Quail Study Group) in 2003 at the Potosi, Missouri, meeting “out of professional interest spurred by a growing sense of responsibility to help build bridges between the quail and songbird communities, based on our tremendous mutual interests,” said NBTC Chair-elect Robert Perez. “She has worked diligently and professionally to broaden our minds and vision, continually striving for more and better integration of priority nongame grassland birds into quail conservation,” Perez said. “She co-coordinated a half-day bobwhite/songbird workshop at the Northeast and Southeast PIF meeting in Virginia Beach in October 2014, to foster better collaboration. In addition, due in part to her leadership as coordinator of the East Gulf Coastal Plain Joint Venture, open pine management for bobwhites and grassland birds remains a top conservation priority across that six-state geography.”
The 2018 National Bobwhite Technical Committee (NBTC) Group Achievement Award recognized the leaders of the 2017 Joint Quail Conference (JQC), in Knoxville, Tennessee, July 24-28, 2017. Committee members spent two years leading and implementing the largest gathering of professional quail biologists—242 registrants—in more than a decade, providing a tremendous opportunity for communication between managers and researchers. The JQC also provided four products with national impact: the 23rd Annual National Bobwhite Technical Committee meeting; the 8th National Quail Symposium; Proceedings of the 8th National Quail Symposium; and the launch of the new e-journal, NBCI National Quail Symposium Proceedings.
Committee members included Roger Applegate, Furbearer/Small Game/Wildlife Health program leader, Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA); Penny Barnhart, accounting specialist, NBCI; Dr. Thomas Dailey, science coordinator and assistant director, NBCI; Andy Edwards, regional biologist, Quail Forever; Beth Emmerich, resource scientist, Missouri Department of Conservation, and chair of the NBTC Science Subcommittee; Molly Foley, data analyst, NBCI; Alyssa Merka, communications specialist, NBCI; Dr. Kelly Reyna, director of Sustainable Agriculture and assistant professor of Wildlife Management, Texas A&M – Commerce, and vice chair of the NBTC Science Subcommittee and academic representative on the NBTC Steering Committee; and Timothy White, wildlife biologist, TWRA.
