While exploring the prairies of Texas during the spring of 1837, John James Audubon claimed the Virginia partridge was “extremely abundant.” The common name for the Virginia partridge is now the Northern bobwhite. Not just in Texas, but the Northern bobwhite was “abundantly met with in all parts of the United States, but more especially towards the interior.” Today in North America a few hundred birds are the most that could be considered extremely abundant due to habitat loss and hunting.
One tactic that Audubon observed hunters resorting to for hunting Northern bobwhites started by waiting for when there was a drizzle or light rain. The hunters would then mount up and gather and go to where the calls of the birds could be heard. If calls were not being heard, the hunters would whistle their best versions of “bob WHITE!” and wait for a response. Once birds were located, the hunters did not shoot but chased the birds into a net that had been put in place opposite from them and the birds. The birds might have taken flight to flee from their pursuers if it was not for their flight feathers being soaked by the rain. “In this manner, fifteen or twenty Partridges are caught at one driving, and sometimes many hundreds in the course of a day.”