;u,s 
Nesting uf Quails. 
into my possession had only a few of the primaries barred 
(all the secondaries were barred) and, when I parted with him 
in August, '10, the 7th, 8th and 9th primaries were still 
only spotted with rufous. The female has the throat white, the 
under parts dull buff and the back beautifully mottled with 
dark grey. The Argoondah Quail is closely related to the 
Jungle Bush Quail (P. asiatica) but prefers open, dry, rocky 
country. It is used by the natives for fighting pui'poses and 
is not esteemed as a table delicacy. 
I kept this pail- in a small h(>ated aviary in a corner 
of which I placed a few tussocks of dead grass. The male soon 
scraped out a hollow under one of these and the female com- 
menced to lay in the last week of December. She took nearly 
a fortnight to lay the full clutch of six eggs, the last being laid 
on the 10th January, on the afternoon of which day she com- 
menced to sit. The male would often squat beside the 
female but never incubated the eggs himself. On the .31st of 
January — a morning when the ground was a sheet of ice and 
the thermometer recorded nine degrees of frost — six little 
Argoondahs were hatched after an incubation period of almost 
21 days (Mr. Seth Smith gives 16 to 19 days for Coturnix). 
So tiny were they that they could pass easily through half -inch 
netting. They were a rich brown on the back and head, with 
dull buff' under parts, and did not show the central dorsal stripe 
so characteristic of the young of many gallinaceous birds. 
Wo should have had nothing for them but soft-food but for 
11\e kindness of our member Mr. Suggitt, who was good enough 
to send me some small gentles which he had preserved in wet 
sand, and which were simply invaluable. On the 6th the quill 
feathers of the wings could be seen. On the 10th (seven degrees 
of frost in the night) buff spots began to appear on the wings 
and the youngsters began to use the latter appendages: these 
spots grew more and more conspicuous, especially with scapu- 
lars, until they formed a parallel series of markings down 
the sides of the back. On the 16tli the adults were pairing 
again, Init they did not desert the young. On the 21st a 
dark line could be distinguished on the sides of the crown above 
the leyebrow stripe: the breast became striped and the buff' 
spots on the wings more triangular. On the 23rd, the female 
