804 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Oct. 17, 1896. 
0<^^ §^8 ^nd §mu 
SOME AMERICAN GAME BIRDS.* 
III.-The Quail. 
From the personal point of view, each one generally 
has his own preference in respect to the bird which he 
prefers to shoot to secure the greatest pleasure, and this 
preference in turn determines the shooter's opinion in 
that such bird is therefore the best of all birds for the pur- 
poses of sport. Thus one prefers ducks, and not consider- 
ing that his own personal idiosyncrasies, or greater suc- 
cess, or habit and long association, or what not, may have 
much to do with his preference, he solemnly affirms that 
duck shooting is the best of all shooting. And so with 
him whose choice of sport is the shooting of some other 
bird — that bird is sure to be exalted above all others. 
But from the standpoint of the greatest good to the 
greatest number, quail shooting for many reasons is the 
best of all shooting. It is a kind which affords such 
mixed shooting — open and cover, slow and swift — that 
parts can be found to meet the skill and fancy of all, be 
the former little or great, and the latter fastidious. 
There is much of the open shooting which is not so diffi- 
cult as to dishearten him of moderate skill, while, on the 
other hand, in cover the shooting tests the skill of the 
most expert sportsman. And again, taken all in all, 
whether in open or cover, the shooter of good average 
skill can compass a good showing in results, having the 
consequent pleasure which comes from reasonable suc- 
cess. And in this connection it may not be amiss to 
maintain that a certain degree of success is essential to 
the shooter's pleasure. Many writers deprecate the con- 
sideration of the bag, treating it as an irrelevant gross 
incident, or one so dominated by the beauties of nature 
and the ethics of shooting in the abstract that it should 
be mentioned in hushed tones or viewed with eyes ask- 
ance. The beautiful and the useful should go hand in 
hand. Each is a part of the great whole, and as such 
should be equal factors in sportsmanship. To the sen- 
timental, which ennobles and adorns the useful of life, 
there must be added the material and the practical; to the 
shooter there must be reward for his efforts. It has often 
been said that it is not all of shooting to shoot, nor all of 
fishing to fish, forgetting the converse that all of shooting 
or fishing being absent there is no shooting nor fishing at 
aU. 
Moreover, now as to quail shooting in respect to 
quantity, there is more of it than there is of any other 
kind of shooting, hence each shooter can better satisfy 
his longings for sport if it be measured by the size of the 
bag or the number of opportunities offered. And there 
also more of it when measured by the matter of time, 
for it extends through a season of about five months, tak- 
ing it as it is in the North and the South. Thus the man 
whose business cares leave him but a few days for shoot- 
ing, and these at no definite time, has more possibilities of 
sport on quail than on any other bird. But the very 
abundance of the bird seems to have checked the proper 
appreciation of it. Not that it is treated with neglect, 
but there seems to be a lack of the enthusiasm and lavish 
use of the superlatives, as is often to be noted when 
writers are discoursing on the ruffed grouse, or woodcock, 
etc. Nevertheless it is not uncommon to have a keen 
relish for what is rare, even if it be not of the best, while 
the good may be so common as to escape notice. 
The quail is more uniformly and widely distributed 
throughout the United States than is any other game 
bird, Its habitat generally comprises both open and 
cover (though to this whole districts are exceptions, as will 
be touched on later), thus, besides giving the sportsman a 
mixed style of shooting, is added the charm of constant 
variety and the testing of his skill in woodcraft. It differs 
in this respect from the ruffed grouse, whose habitat is in 
the woods, and therefore in a much smaller section of the 
United States than is that of the quail; the former being 
strictly a bird of the forest, it in practical shooting never 
can be the bird of the people, though it be a bird whose 
qualities win the most admiration, qualities equal to test- 
ing the skill of the best sportsmen. 
All works on natural history, so far as I know, teach 
that the quail's habitat comprises conjointly both open 
and cover, and while such is true in a general way, there 
are important exceptions to it — so much that a work de- 
voted to the habits and habitat of the quail as they are in 
one locality might be distinctly erroneous if applied to 
the quail of some other locality. In this respect it differs 
from the prairie chicken and the ruffed grouse; for of the 
one it may be said without qualification that it is a bird 
of the prairie, of the other that it is a bird of the woods; 
and such saying of them will be found to be true wher- 
ever those birds may be found. The quail thrives wher- 
ever it can obtain a food supply, in open or cover. It 
readily adjusts its habitat according to the dominating 
circumstances of food and cover, whether it be in prairie 
* The first paper of this series, the Woodcock, was printed in issue 
of Sept. 13. The second, the Ruffed Grouse, Oct. 10. Others to follow 
will be devoted to the Quail and the Snipe. 
or woods, or a country comprising both open and cover. 
In the coimtry north of the Ohio and east of the Missis- 
sippi rivers it frequents the open fields largely, preferring 
such as have a good food supply, with hedges or old walls 
and fences fringed with brush, or nearby woods and 
thickets to which it can run or fly for shelter or safety. 
In these sections it rarely goes far into the woods, prefer- 
ring to skirt along the outer edges of them merely for pro- 
tection and shelter, as the hawks are its deadly enemies 
and it needs to be ever alert in avoiding them. 
Flights. 
Often the flight of the quail is a compromise between 
cover and open, it including both, so that on the other 
hand it is never so easy a prey to mediocre skill as is the 
bird of the open, the prairie chicken, the bird of slow 
wing, little given to strategy in evading its enemies, and 
trusting for safety to open flight, which is neither swift 
in itself nor puzzling to the shooter. As the ruffed grouse 
is so difficult as to be discouraging to most of shooters as 
being beyond their skill, patience or endurance, so the 
prairie chicken, being at the other extreme, soon dulls 
the sportsman's interest from the monotony of the sport 
which is afforded and the ease with which the bird may 
be killed. The chief merit of chicken shooting consists 
in that it is summer shooting, coming at a time when the 
zest of the sportsman is keen from months of deprivation 
from sport with dog and gun, and when the outing has 
the charm of the prairie in its most beautiful adorning 
and the novelty of the shooting season's beginning. 
There is a monotonous sameness to chicken flights which 
begin and end in the open, thus lacking the spirit which 
pervades the sport wherein is a variety of flights in cover 
and open,and wherein the trees and brush force the shooter 
to time bis shots and to quick decision to take advantage 
of the opportunities offered. Such combinations of ob- 
structions and, flights, combining curves and straight 
lines, require a style of shooting difiEering in every par- 
ticular from the spiritless and calculating shooting so 
commonly practiced by the methodical chicken shooter. 
When the chicken becomes very wild, as it does late in 
the season, flushing at long ranges, it is difficult to shoot 
it, though shooting then is a test of the gun quite as 
much as it is of the shooter, and it is at a time when 
nearly all shooters have finished their shooting on the 
prairie, hence late chicken shooting is not worthy of much 
consideration as a sport of the many. 
Roosts and Shooting. 
It of tenest roosts in the open fields where there is at 
least a few inches growth of grass, or stubble, or weeds 
for concealment, and it uses the same place many times 
if not constantly disturbed, as indicated by the grass or 
other vegetation being beaten down in the small circular 
opening — the roost — about 2ft. in diameter, and the pile 
of droppings in the center of it. The birds roost on the 
ground, bunched up close in a circular form with their 
heads outside; thus all facing toward the outer circumfer- 
ence of the circle, which cannot be approached yithout 
coming to the view of some bird; and thus the arrange- 
ment is said to provide for the safety of the whole. In 
theory it seems an admirable arrangement; in practice 
it works very faultily. They often fly reluctantly when 
they have comfortably adjusted themselves for a night's 
rest, and the pointer or setter can draw very close to them 
then, generally doing it witji greater precision than when 
they are more scattered about, the evening hours also 
being more favorable for stronger scent. Were not dogs 
trained to such stanchness as is required in shooting, they 
could easily at such juncture spring in and capture, as 
indeed some partially trained dogs will do under the 
circumstances. 
In the States of greatest bird abimdance, as in Arkansas, 
Mississippi, etc. , and where there are many ragweed fields, 
in them very destructive shooting often takes place near 
the twilight hours, when the birds have settled themselves 
for their night slumbers. When the dog points, the 
shooter fixes himself at a good distance from the roost to 
obtain the best scatter of the shot. Then the birds being 
flushed, they swarm up loosely all together for 3 or 4ft., 
where the shooter snaps them and often does nearly as 
much damage as if he had potted the birds on the ground. 
It is hardly necessary to add that this practice is disap- 
proved by all true sportsmen. 
In the Prairie Region. 
In Minnesota, Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and other 
prairie States the quail readily adapts itself to the local 
peculiarities of the different sections, utilizing such slight 
advantages as may offer, as hedges, fences, the cover 
with which most streams are fringed, high weeds, etc. , in 
this respect the habitat of one bevy being quite distinct 
from that of another even in the same inimediate 
locality 
Its Enemies. 
It sadly needs cover for its protection, its enemies being 
both of air and earth — hawks, foxes, dogs, etc. — and the 
eggs too fall a prey to the rapacious appetites of some 
of its enemies. In the South the cur dogs of the negroes 
— every family owning from one to as many as they can 
possibly maintain, and aU kept in a kind of half-famished 
condition— prowl through the fields seeking for food, and 
they are the very worst of egg destroyers. Were it not 
so hardy and prolific a bird its fate would be swift and 
certain extermination. The negro dogs seem to be almost 
omnivorous. In the fall they may be seen making daily 
visits to some persimmon tree, where they eat the fallen 
fruit with great apparent relish, and the ones which have 
some claim to hound blood are not averse to making a 
meal in the cornfield on corn when it is in the milky 
stage. With such rapacious enemies to contend against, 
the destruction of the quail must be great, but in addition 
to all that, many are trapped and netted, methods which 
destroy whole bevies at a time, 
Quail of the Woodland. 
But to return to the matter of the quail's habitat — in 
certain parts of the South, as in the oak woods in sections 
of Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, or in the pine woods 
of Louisiana, Mississippi, etc., the quail may live 
wholly in the woods, food being therein secured in 
abundance, and food is always a first consideration. In 
cover some of the shooting is easy and some of it very 
difficult, though hardly ranking in the latter count 
witl^ ruffed grouse, in respect to which bird the quail is 
neither so wary nor so wild. Shooting in some parts of 
the pine woods is almost as easy shooting as is that of the 
open, the ground being bare except for its covering of 
dry pine needles. The smooth trunks of the pine trees 
standing several yards apart and free from limbs upward 
of 30 or 40ft. offer no serious obstacle to the shooting. 
In other sections of the pine woods, where the growth of 
the trees is more stunted and the limbs grow from near 
the ground up, the difficulty of the shooting is second to 
none, and in some sections almost impossible, 
Prairie Quail. 
Again, there are sections wherein the quail lives on the 
open prairie, as in parts of Arkansas, and that being 
strictly open shooting it much resembles chicken shoot- 
ing, excepting the difference in the size and speed of the 
two birds, the quail being much the quicker to get away 
at the start. It makes its flight in the open prairie, 
lighting near any little bit of shrubbery, be it no more 
than a bush or two of sumac, which by the way grows 
here and there on the prairie in Arkansas. In the woods 
when pursued it frequently takes to the tree tops for 
safety, where it is safe indeed. On the warm days, or 
when there has been a long spell of pleasant weather, it 
is far less wild than when the weather has been stormy, 
or when there has been a sudden change from warm to 
cold. Such changes add to the difficulties of the shoot- 
ing immeasurably. 
Northern Shooting. 
In the North it makes its habitat where some buck- 
wheat or other grain field will be available for a food sup- 
ply. It so arranges its haunts that it has some cover 
within easy flight, to the densest part of which it flies for 
safety when flushed, not refusing the heavily timbered 
swamps if too much jiersecuted by the shooter. In such 
places it has an excellent chance to foil its pursuer by 
simply running away, or if pressed to take flight it has 
many chances to escape owing to the difficulty of shoot- 
ing accurately in the dense cover. 
New England shooting is the most difficult of all quail 
shooting, excepting perhaps shooting in the dense pines 
of some sections of the South, the shooting being difficult 
in itself, and to have any satisfactory success the scattered 
birds must be diligently followed and sought in the thick- 
ets, be they ever so dense. In this respect it differs from 
shooting in the sections of more abundance, where such 
close attention to the scattered birds is unnecessary either 
for sport or the interest of the bag. 
In the South, where there is an abundance of birds 
comparatively, the sportsman rarely tarries with a bevy 
which gives him any special difficulty. It is much easier 
and more satisfactory to go on and seek more birds. For 
this reason, even under favorable opportunity, the scat- 
tered birds are never as a rule hunted till the last one is 
flushed and marked down, and flushed again when it is 
possible, the limit to seeking them in the North being 
generally when there is no hope of -finding the birds at 
all. These are good reasons why the birds of the North 
should be wilder than the birds of the South, and why 
there should be differences in the methods employed in 
shooting them. 
In New England buckwheat fields are the choicest re- 
sorts for food, and any adjacent brush or long grass of 
swamp or upland or the skirts of woods afford them 
the shelter and protection that they need or seek. No 
doubt the birds become wilder in the North than in the 
South, for first of all the inclement weather of the North 
tends to make them so, and there is a much more relent- 
less pursuit of them by the shooter. The birds being 
scarce, after the bevy is scattered the search continues 
while there is a hope of finding a single remaining one, 
and if success with them has been unsatisfactory the 
shooter may return later to catch them, when they are 
whistling to each other in their attempts to come together 
as a bevy. 
Quail Dogs, 
In the broad plantations of Mississippi, Alabama, Ten- 
nessee, Arkansas, etc., a dog of reasonably wide range is 
necessary — much wider than_would be either desirable or 
