hAMILY Tetraonidx. 



will prove, for he says : " Familiar as I have been with 

 almost all parts of Vermont for more than thirty years, 

 I have seen only one Quail in the State, and he was evi- 

 dently a ' tramp.' " 



Mr. Ned Dearborn writes in his Birds of Durham, 

 N. H . : " While the Quail is a permanent resident, its 

 numbers vary greatly from year to year. In the fall of 

 1897 they were plentiful, not less than fifty living within 

 a radius of two miles of the college. Comparatively 

 few were shot, yet in the spring they were nearly all 

 gone, and for the next two years they were scarce. In 

 1900 they were fully as abundant as in 1897.'* He also 

 writes in his Birds of Belknap Co., N. H., that Tilton is 

 " about the northern limit of the Quail's range. " 



The habits of the birds are, to say the least, peculiar. 

 Descend suddenly upon a mother with her chicks and 

 she immediately goes crazy, leaves her offspring (which 

 at once scatters for cover), and proceeds to flop along the 

 ground as though injured, all the while uttering alarm- 

 notes and frightened chirps ! But this is done mostly 

 for effect; if it distracts the mind of the intruder, co 

 much the better chance for escape ; and truth to tell, in 

 less than three seconds there is not a trace of mother or 

 chicks in the neighborhood. In case a covey of mature 

 birds are scattered, for quite a while afterward one 

 may hear them calling themselves together again by 

 peculiarly expressive minor notes singularly like those of 

 young chickens. They usually roost on some little hillock 

 in pasture or field, in a closely huddled group, tails in 

 and heads out ; in this position, so admirably adapted 

 for defence, a charge by the enemy is often repulsed 

 with success and brought to utter confusion. The sud- 

 den whirr and flap of a lot of wings is no ordinary thing 

 to face ; it would unnerve even the crafty fox, and one 

 may easily imagine him creeping unguardedly upon what 

 to quote Mr. Chapman's excellent description will 

 shortly prove to be "a living bomb whose explosion ig 

 scarcely less startling than that of dynamite." 



