104 CONCERNING QUAILS AND LANDRAILS 



Although no birds are more inveterately migratory than 

 quails, only occasionally, at long intervals of years, an 

 influx of them takes place into the British Isles; and 

 the birds remain, not only to breed, but to winter there. 

 It is as though they had been carried out of their reckon- 

 ing, and, finding food abundant and climate endurable, if 

 not quite ideal, had made the best of circumstances, and 

 settled as colonists. It is on record that about the year 

 1838 large flights of quails arrived in Britain, and for 

 five-and-twenty years after that nested regularly, but in 

 steadily decreasing numbers. When I was a lad, two or 

 three brace of quails were quite a common complement 

 to a bag of partridges in the south-west of Scotland; 

 indeed, I have seen a separate column for quails printed 

 in a game book. But the last quail I shot was about the 

 year 1869 or 1870, since which it has been exceedingly 

 rare to hear of one until the present season. 



Great is the mystery of the little quail. The main 

 route of migration continues the same as it must have 

 been before the Mediterranean was. Quails treat that 

 chasm, measuring a cool million of square miles in extent 

 and some five hundred miles in breadth, as a mere incident 

 of travel, just as people going on an omnibus to the City 

 may give fleeting notice to the place where Temple Bar 

 once stood. Yet their short, round wings seem of the 

 worst possible design for sustained flight. The sportsman 

 knows the quail, in this country at least, as a bird 

 reluctant to rise, which, when flushed, buzzes off with a 

 flurry to no great distance. It is certain that a consider- 

 able percentage of the flocks are lost at sea, but that is 

 as nothing compared to the enormous numbers that are 

 netted for the markets of every great city in Europe. 



