VALLEY QUAIL 535 



Eaymond, Madera County, he averaged about sixty birds per day. 

 By careful handling he was able to secure better prices than other 

 market hunters. After killing a dozen or fifteen quail, they were 

 drawn, tied three in a bunch, and hung up to cool over night. All 

 the birds which he had thus prepared were on the following, day 

 placed in wooden boxes with thin boards between each two layers. 

 They thus reached the cities in beautiful condition and brought him 

 from $1.50 to $2.25 per dozen, fifty cents more per dozen than quail 

 shipped loosely in sacks, as was the practice of other hunters. 



T. S. Van Dyke (1890, p. 460) states that market hunters used 

 to ship 10,000 quail apiece during a single season ; daily bags of 200, 

 made by sporting men shooting the birds singly on the wing, were 

 not unusual. C. H. Shinn (1890, p. 464) says that in eighteen con- 

 secutive hunts two hunters at San Diego secured from 47 to 187 

 quail on each hunt, in addition to other game ; six bags of more than 

 one hundred each were made. Other individual daily bags of six,, 

 twelve and twenty-two dozen, respectively, were known to this author. 

 In the hills between the southern San Joaquin Valley and Carrizo 

 Plains, E. W. Nelson (A. K. Fisher, 1893a, pp. 28-29) found the 

 Valley Quail very numerous. 



It was excessively abundant at some of the springs in the hills about the Tem- 

 ploa Mountains and Carrizo Plain. In the week following the expiration of the 

 closed season, two men, pot-hunting for the market, were reported to have killed 

 8,400 quail at a solitary spring in the Temploa [Temblor] Mountains. The men 

 built a brush blind near the spring, which was the only water within a distance of 

 20 miles, and as evening approached the quails came to it by thousands. One of 

 Mr. Nelson's informants who saw the birds at this place stated that the ground 

 all about the water was covered by a compact body of quails, so that the hunters 

 mowed them down by the score at every discharge. 



Not only were quail shot for the market, but previous to 1880, 

 they were regularly trapped in large numbers. In that year the prac- 

 tice was stopped by law. Cooper, writing in 1870 (1870a, p. 551), 

 states that they were constantly exposed for sale alive in San Fran- 

 cisco, where many escaped from their cages to fly from roof to roof, 

 occasionally descending into city gardens. Many trapped birds were 

 shipped east at that time. 



Hedderly (1912c, p. 309) gives an account of the successful rear- 

 ing of Valley Quail in captivity by William Schneider of "Whittier, 

 Los Angeles County. Starting with six birds in 1905, by 1912 he 

 was able to rear between 400 and 500 young birds, more in fact than 

 he needed for his own table. Some interesting facts, learned in the 

 course of his experience with the quail, were : that they are not polyga- 

 mous, each male selecting one female and remaining with her until the 

 young birds are hatched, and paying no attention to other females even 



