THE SUN SCORCHES A STRETCH OF ARIZONA DESERT as two women stride through clumps of golden grass, dodging prickly pear cacti on a late morning in September. Between them they carry a wooden box punctuated with round breathing holes. They set it down in an arid wash thick with mesquite trees and slide open a door on one side. Then they quietly make their way over to a small group of people on the edge of the wash and stand like silent sentinels, not wanting to frighten the rare creatures inside.
Soon about a dozen tiny, speckled chicks bumble and wobble out into the clearing. These birds, taking their first, tentative steps in their new home, are Masked Bobwhites—quail once thought extinct that are now poised to reclaim this patch of their historical range after a century-long absence.
The critically endangered bird, native to southern Arizona and northern Mexico, is the focus of a decades-long recovery effort that, after many fits and starts, is finally showing signs of promise. The chick release today is a key part of a revamped program that aims to reestablish a wild population in southern Arizona, at the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. In 1985 the government set aside more than 100,000 acres of flat plains, rolling grassland hills, and oak-lined canyons specifically to conserve the gregarious quail.
Since 2018 the recovery team has released some 1,800 chicks on the refuge, including about 700 let loose last year. A fraction have survived, and, to the delight of federal biologists, some of the survivors have reproduced. An early-2020 count put the Buenos Aires population, the world’s only known wild Masked Bobwhites, at about 200 individuals. It’s a huge milestone, says Lacrecia Johnson, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who
