THE GAME BREEDER 



107 



Mexican Q jail -Imported by W. J. Mackensen and mounted by Taxidermist Fred Sauter. 



QUAIL AND PARTRIDGE BREEDING FOR SPORT 



AND FOR PROFIT. 



By Dwight W. Huntington. 



The system on which we work in the nesting season is to assist the methods of nature in 

 every way we can, but never to supplant them by methods of our own, recognizing that the 

 partridge is a better parent than any substitute we can hope to provide, and that birds reared 

 under natural conditions in a wild state make the best and healthiest stock.— 'Aymer Maxwell. 



Our quails or partridges, like the gray 

 partridges of Europe, thrive best in ag- 

 ricultural regions. The range of the bob- 

 white rapidly was extended with the in- 

 crease of cultivated areas in the West, 

 and the birds increased in numbers for 

 a time when bigger game was plenti- 

 ful and there was comparatively little 

 quail shooting. When the newly-made 

 farms were inclosed with rail fences with 

 their angles full of wild foods and safe 

 covers (weeds, grasses, briars, sumach 

 wild rose, furnishing many seeds and 

 berries), and when there was much pro- 

 tective undergrowth in the adjacent 

 woodlands, the land was far more at- 

 tractive and safe than it became with 

 the introduction of wire fences, close 

 cultivation, and the destruction of the 

 under-brush and wild foods in the wood- 

 lands. I have revisited some of my 

 favorite quail grounds in the West where 

 we made famous bags of game, only to 



observe^ that large areas ha<l been ren- 

 dered as uninhabitable for the quail as 

 the marshes are for ducks when they 

 have been drained in the interest of ag- 

 riculture. Neither game laws, game of- 

 ficers, nor gunners should be held ac- 

 countable for the disappearance of the 

 game in places where it can not survive 

 because of the loss of nesting sites, cov- 

 ers and foods. 



All sportsmen know that plowed fields, 

 meadows, pastures, fields planted in fall 

 wheat, and other naked fields surrounded 

 by wire fences and entirely devoid of 

 briars, weeds and other covers and foods, 

 will not harbor any quail. No one would 

 think of running his dogs over such 

 grounds with the hope of finding any 

 game. The prairie grouse, also, rapidly 

 became extinct on vast closely tilled 

 areas and it would be as impossible to 

 introduce and preserve either quail or 

 grouse on such lands, without first re- 



