70 TET11AONID.E. 



In the winter of 1831-32, my attention was first particularly 

 directed to the continuance, throughout the year, of the quail in 

 Ireland, and from that period until the present there was hardly a 

 day from November till March in which it was not exposed for 

 sale in the shops of the game- dealers in Belfast. From that winter 

 (1831-32) until the season of 1834-35 the numbers remaining 

 annually increased ; and during the latter, they were more 

 numerous than had ever been previously remembered by old 

 sportsmen. Notes on the numbers killed by a sporting 

 relative, when walking across stubble fields direct from one bog 

 to another in pursuit of snipes, have been furnished to me, 

 and from them it appears that the greatest quantity seen on any 

 day in November or December was fifteen brace, on the 10th of 

 the latter month, 4^ brace of which were shot on one day. They 

 appeared generally in bevies of three or four that season ;* all 

 alluded to were seen in their summer haunts, in the county of 

 Down, within six miles of Belfast. The same gentleman shot four 

 brace one forenoon about the 1st of January, 1835, near Larne, 

 in the county of Antrim ; and saw many more on the same day. 

 He never met with more quails when partridge-shooting at the 

 commencement of the season than he did in the month of Decem- 

 ber 1834. In the winter of 1836-37, about Christmas, a person 

 of my acquaintance shot ten brace of quails in stubble fields bor- 

 dering Belfast bay, to the north of Carrickfergus. They are, how- 

 ever, as plentiful inland, as in maritime districts. In the letter 

 from Mr. J. V. Stewart before referred to, that gentleman men- 

 tioned liis having met with the quail at the end of January about 

 Letterkenny ; and Mr. George Bowen, of Burt, in the north of 

 the same county (Donegal), informed me that five or six brace 

 can easily be obtained there in the course of a day's shooting 

 about Christmas. Mr. Knox, in his work just published on the 

 Birds of Sussex, remarks :-^" In Ireland I have found them 

 [quails] abundant in the King's County during the winter. They 



* A friend, when partridge-shooting in September, once sprang fifteen or sixteen 

 quails from the same place. 



