92 THE QUAIL 



" Ah ! what sweet accents fall softly around, 



Praise the Lord ! Praise the Lord ! (Fiirchte Gott !) 

 Murmurs the quaint little quail from the ground." * 



The bird's cry of " Bit by bit," and his mate's reply, 

 ' Wet my weet, Wet my weet," as we render it, is not 

 often heard now in our own country. This is attributed 

 by some to the fact that most of the Quail's favourite 

 feeding-grounds have been " improved " away. Fine 

 pasture-lands are now w'here the ground was once coarse 

 and covered with tussock, bent, thistles, burdock, hawk- 

 weed, and such plants as flourish in uncared-for lands, 

 and in such surroundings the Quail delighted to remain. 

 Now, only very few winter with us ; the majority leave 

 in October for the South. 



The Quail is an accomplished ventriloquist, and the 

 late Lord Lilford, in his " Notes on the Birds of North- 

 amptonshire," says that he often heard a caged Quail 

 calling when within a few feet of him, which yet gave the 

 impression of being many yards distant. On the 

 western side of Corfu he found numbers of these birds 

 in the currant-vines on very steep hill-sides, and vast 

 numbers are bred in the cultivated plains around and 

 below Seville, where their numbers are thinned in the 

 pairing season by a clever method of calling the birds 

 into a net by imitating the call-note of the female. On 

 the island of Capri, in the Bay of Naples, it is on record 

 that as many as 160,000 have been netted in a single 

 season. 



Many of us have eaten them in the South of France 

 during the grape season. The birds can be caught by 

 the hand when they have, as the French say, intoxicated 



* See Beethoven's song "The Call of the Quail." One of Antoinette 

 Sterling's favourites. 



