70 
TETRAONID^. 
In the winter of 1831-32, my attention was first particularly 
directed to the continuance, throughout the year, of the quail in 
Ireland, and from that period until the present there was hardly a 
day from November till March in which it was not exposed for 
sale in the shops of the game- dealers in Belfast. Prom that winter 
(1831-32) until the season of 1834-35 the numbers remaining 
annually increased ; and during the latter, they were more 
numerous than had ever been previously remembered by old 
sportsmen. Notes on the numbers killed by a sporting 
relative, when walking across stubble fields direct from one bog 
to another in pursuit of snipes, have been furnished to me, 
and from them it appears that the greatest quantity seen on any 
day in November or December was fifteen brace, on the 10th of 
the latter month, 4| brace of which were shot on one day. They 
appeared generally in bevies of three or four that season all 
alluded to were seen in their summer haunts, in the county of 
Down, within six miles of Belfast. The same gentleman shot four 
brace one forenoon about the 1st of January, 1835, near Larne, 
in the county of Antrim ; and saw many more on the same day. 
He never met with more quails when partridge-shooting at the 
commencement of the season than he did in the month of Decem- 
ber 1834. In the winter of 1836-37, about Christmas, a person 
of my acquaintance shot ten brace of quails in stubble fields bor- 
dering Belfast bay, to the north of Carrickfergus. They are, how- 
ever, as plentiful inland, as in maritime districts. In the letter 
from Mr. J. Y. Stewart before referred to, that gentleman men- 
tioned his having met with the quail at the end of January about 
Letterkenny; and Mr. George Bowen, of Burt, in the north of 
the same county (Donegal), informed me that five or six brace 
can easily be obtained there in the course of a day^s shooting 
about Christmas. Mr. Knox, in his work just published on the 
Birds of Sussex, remarks : — In Ireland I have found them 
[quails] abundant in the King^’s County during the winter. They 
* A frieud, wlien partridge-shooting in September, once sprang fifteen or sixteen 
quails from the same place. 
