132 GAME BIRDS OF INDIA AND ASIA. 



A special place for quails, where these birds may 

 be kept for food, should, however, it is said, be kept 

 dark to prevent their fighting. The floor of a 

 "quailery" should be well supplied with sand, and 

 fresh turf, white ants occasionally, and a constant 

 supply of water in a small trough should be pro- 

 vided in addition to their ordinary food of millet. 

 Thus treated they wiH keep fat and healthy, and, 

 as many people know, be of the greatest use in the 

 hot weather. As they are even better to eat when 

 properly fattened than when killed wild, it is not 

 only humane but politic to treat them as well as 

 possible, as is the case with all other animals in a 

 state of captivity or domestication. 



The natural food of this quail is miUet and other 

 grain when it can get it, and at other times grass- 

 seed and small insects chiefly ; it feeds chiefly in 

 the morning and evening, resting in the middle of 

 the day. Here and there a few pairs remain and 

 breed with us, even in the East as far as Purneah 

 and south in the Deccan. These, however, seem not 

 to be of a resident strain or race, such as exists in 

 some other countries which quail also visit as 

 migrants, but birds which by some accident, have 

 been unable or unwilling to depart with the rest of 

 their kind. 



Though the male has the reputation of associat- 

 ing with several females where the species is 

 numerous, he appears to pair with one only in 

 India ; the nest is a mere hollow in the ground, 

 usually with more or less of a lining of grass. In 

 India ten eggs appear to the largest clutch, thougli 

 up to fourteen may be laid in Europe. 



These eggs are a little over an inch long ; and are 

 spotted with brown on a buff ground, the mark- 



