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Save Your Quail 
In the public parks of Edinburgh, Scotland, 
in place of the conventional ‘Keep Off the 
Grass” signs, there are displayed sign-boards 
bearing the legend, ‘‘Citizens, Protect Your 
Property.”’ Not so bad for the Land of the 
Thistle, and: it suggests big possibilities, when 
applied to the protection of fish and game. 
In this country, in the Northern States, we 
have already been ‘“‘carrying coals to New- 
castle,”’ as regards our quail-shooting, and the 
crisis now approaching is that there will be no 
more coal to carry. In spite of the Lacey law, 
there has been carried on an astounding traffick- 
ing in live quail, the States of the South and 
Southwest being annually robbed to stock 
depleted coverts in the North. And even the 
game commissions of certain Northern States 
have not hesitated to buy live quail in the South 
“for scientific purposes.” 
Where quail are so scarce as they ie been in 
these instances, would it not be more honest— 
in view of the law forbidding the exportation of 
live quail from other States, except for scientific 
pur poses—would it not be more sportsmanlike 
to stop shooting the home supply and let them 
do their own restocking? 
At any rate, whether we wish to be fair or not, 
the citizens of the States and Territories that 
have been so long systematically robbed—in the 
name of science!—are aroused. Texas sports- 
men have been hot after the quail-netters during 
the past winter, and the people of Alabama de- 
clare they are going to have an efficient game 
commission and stop the stealing of their quail. 
It is, indeed, the height of asinine “game 
propagation” for game commissioners and 
game associations of Northern States, where 
quail are practically extinct, to buy Southern 
quail in the winter and turn them down in the 
spring to mate and multiply and then let them 
all be killed off in the fall. In Massachusetts, 
where the native stock of quail has not survived 
the recent severe winters nor the excessive 
shooting, and where different sportsmen’s 
‘associations have been systematically importing 
quail, regardless of the Lacey law, the open 
season for quail continues throughout the 
month of November. In Pennsylvania—whose 
Game Commission has only the past spring 
planted several hundred dozens of quail that 
were brought from the South—the open season 
is from November 1 to December 1. And the 
State Game Commissioner openly confesses that 
there would not be one single quail in the Key- 
stone State to-day were it not for those which 
have been imported from time to time. In New 
Hampshire, the open season extends for two 
months and a-half, and in Vermont, for four 
months—despite the fact that quail are almost 
as rare in those States as snowballs are in July. 
These are just a few examples which show 
that the shooters want quail-shooting, regardless 
of where the quail come from or how long they 
last. But when it is stated that the game com- 
mission of the once great quail state of Illinois 
has found it necessary to disregard the Lacey law 
during the past spring, to brace up the quail 
supply, it should not strain the perception of 
the average quail-shooter—North or South—to 
figure out how long the sport will last in his 
vicinity, unless conditions change. 
We are shooting too many quail. We have 
cleaned them out of the older States of the North, 
and we of the North now go South to shoot off 
the supply down there, and, failing to accom- 
plish this in our allotted time, and with only one 
pair of legs each, we have a supply trapped and 
sent up home, to be turned out to breed and 
afford us shooting on our own grounds the next 
fall. A man living in New York City can shoot 
quail from November 1 to New Year’s Day, and 
then he can go down to Mississippi and keep 
banging away till the first of May—a six months’ 
quail season! And there are men who do it; 
and, furthermore, there are some who claim 
residence in more than one State. We happen 
to know positively of only one, who claims both 
New York State and Mississippi as his place of 
residence, he owning a home in each State, and 
so gets out of paying a non-resident license fee. 
When we remember that there are over 
300,000 (Government estimate) shooters in this 
country who hunt quail every year, and that a 
good percentage of these hunt both in the North 
and in the South, it is only reasonable to predict 
that, if conditions remain as they now are, the 
bob-white quail will soon, very soon, become one 

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