COMMON QUAIL. 431 



hard to find, but Mr. Newcome has eggs brought to him 

 nearly every year from the same locality. 



With regard to this local abundance of a species, 

 elsewhere diminished very considerably in numbers, it is 

 well worthy of note that, as I learn from Mr. Alfred 

 Newton, the influx of quails to this particular locality 

 occurred subsequently to the drainage of the fen-lands 

 in that district, and thus the artificial change in the 

 nature of the soil, which expelled so many former 

 denizens of the swamp, would seem in its partially 

 reclaimed condition to have had unusual attractions for 

 this particular species. May we not find, in this one 

 fact, some clue to the cause of their scarcity of late 

 years both in this and other counties ? In Ireland, Mr. 

 Thompson describes them as most frequently flushed 

 by the sportsman "when walking across stubble fields 

 direct from one bog to another in pursuit of snipe ; and 

 Mr. Knox (" Birds of Sussex"), from personal experience 

 in the same country, speaks of them as "partial to 

 backward oat-stubbles on poor swampy soils, just verging 

 on the borders of the great red bogs," from which it is 

 evident that although partial to the vicinity of moist 

 grounds, a far drier soil is necessary to their existence, 

 with such shelter as would be afforded by reaped stubbles, 

 or thick rushy spots on the borders of cultivation. Now, 

 it is just this particular condition of things which has 

 ceased almost entirely to exist in Norfolk. From the 

 time, as Mr. Lubbock has well observed, that "the 

 extravagant prices caused by continual war excited a 

 general eagerness to enclose all available land," the 

 rough grounds bordering upon the actual swamps have 

 been most readily adapted to agricultural purposes, 

 whilst clean short stubbles are the rule and not the ex- 

 ception under the modern system of farming operations.* 



* Mr. Thompson (Birds of Ireland, vol. ii., p. 69) remarking 

 (1850) on the increase of the quail in Ireland owing, as he believed, 



