I896.] 20 j 



THE QUAIL IN IRELAND: 



ITS PRESENT AND RECENT VISITS. 

 BY C. B. MOFFAT. 



The re-appearance in 1896 of the Quail has already been 

 reported from the counties of Cork/ Tipperary,^ and Wicklow,' 

 and doubtless observers in many other localities have, like 

 myself in Co. Wexford, heard and seen the bird. 



The general conditions prevailing this year so strongly 

 resemble those of 1893, when Quails excited attention in a 

 number of localities throughout Ireland, that the return of 

 the birds in 1896 will scarcely cause surprise ; but it would be 

 a mistake to make too little of our erratic visitant, for whose 

 next re-appearance on our shores we may have many years to 

 wait. 



At the time when the Irish Naturalist was founded in 1892 

 the Quail was looked upon as practically lost to our fauna. 

 There were still a few counties in which it could not be said 

 to have ceased to breed, at least occasionally — (Donegal, 

 Louth, Dublin, Roscommon, and Wexford were those from 

 which Mr. Ussher had recent notes of its nesting) ; but the 

 localities were very few, and the records therefrom I believe 

 rather meagre. At Ballyhyland (in the last-named county) it 

 had been unknown for many years. In the first number of 

 this periodical Mr. Ussher referred to the rapid decrease in 

 Ireland of the Quail, Golden and Sea Eagles, and Marsh 

 Harrier — all four species being then apparently on the verge 

 of extinction. 



Rather curiously, it was in the summer of the same year 

 that the Quail began to put in his appearance again, though 

 the incursion of 1892 was little noticed at the time by or- 

 nithologists in this country. I happened, that summer, to 

 spend several whole nights in the fields in the neighbourhood 

 of Ballyhyland, partly for the purpose of improving my 

 acquaintance with a family of Nightjars ; and it was on one 

 of these occasions that I first heard the cry of ** wet-my-lip" 

 (or " quick- whip-it " as it rather sounds to m}^ ear) with which 

 the Quail is wont to enliven the cool hours. The moon being 



* See p. 192. ^ Fields July nth. 3 Land and Watery June 13th. 



