THE COMMON OR GREY QUAIL. 141 



Where birds get up at every step dogs or beaters are worse than 

 useless, and where the game is so plentiful search after a wound- 

 ed bird is seldom thought worth the trouble. It is usual to be 

 provided with two or three guns,* to be loaded as fast as emptied 

 by a servant. With one gun only it would be necessary to wash 

 out the barrels two or three times in the course of the after- 

 noon, or at all events to wait every now and then for them to 

 cool. A tolerably good shot will bag fifty to sixty brace in 

 about three hours, and knock down many others that are not 

 found. I remember one day getting into a deyra, or island 

 formed by alluvial deposit, in the Ganges, between Patna 

 (Bankipore) and Sonepore, which was sown almost entirely 

 over with gram (chunna), and which literally swarmed with 

 Quail. I do not exaggerate when I say they were like locusts 

 in number. Every step that brushed the covert sent off a 

 number of them, so that I had to stand every now and then 

 like a statue and employ my arms only, and that in a stealthy 

 manner, for the purpose of loading and firing. A furtive 

 scratch of the head, or a wipe of the heated brow, dismissed 

 a whole ' bevy' into the next field; and, in fact, the embarras 

 de richesse was nearly as bad as if there had been no birds 

 at all. 



" Quails are much more abundant in the Upper Provinces 

 than in Central India or Bengal. In the Madras Presidency 

 they become rare, and on the east of the Bay of Bengal are un- 

 known.-f- In their migrations to and fro they make the Himala 

 mountains a temporary resting place, and at such seasons I 

 have seen astonishing numbers of them in the ripened rice 

 fields of Kathmandu, in Nepal. Their stay there is very 

 limited. At Darjeeling, where there was in 1842 little or no 

 open ground, this bird was unknown ; but I know not what may 

 be the case now, It is not very plentiful either in the humid 

 plains of the Terai, although in some of the higher parts of 

 Tirhoot I have had tolerably good sport with them. In Chota 

 Nagpore it is in some parts plentiful, and in others, apparently 

 similar, not to be found. The cause of this seeming capricious- 

 ness we could never detect, although it was much inquired into 

 by the sportsmen in Ranchee and Dorunda, the head quarters, 

 civil and military, of that district. We used to remark that 

 after the fields had been cleared of their crops, and shortly 

 before the bird's departure to northern climes, it inhabited the 

 bush jungle in common with the Black and Grey Partridges 

 and the Bush and Button Quails. In such localities it finds 

 shelter and concealment and food in various kinds of wild 

 grasses, and is thus enabled to prolong its stay in India longer 



* Refers to ante-Breech-loader days.— A. O. H. 



+ Except as stragglers to Arakan and Pegu, but Colonel Tickell was referring to 

 Central Tenasserim, which he knew well, and to which, despite what Blyth says, 

 I do not believe that they extend at all, though one might be shot there, just as one 

 Likh was shot at Sandoway. — A, O, H. 



