QUAIL SHOOTING 
coast, and are often killed in numbers by people that go on purpose.”* 
But that is now a thing of the past. Nor is it worth while to examine in 
detail the present status of the quail in other English counties; it being 
the general opinion of sportsmen that these birds are not nearly so 
common in September as they used to be. 
With a view to remedying this general scarcity of quail a few land- 
owners turned out imported birds obtained from London poulterers. The 
late Mr Borrer, of Cowfold, near Horsham, wrote; “Many years ago my 
father-in-law turned down several dozen on a farm not far from the downs, 
but never afterwards fell in with one of them.”f In the same county, at 
Middlehurst, Mr Malcolm Burr reported in 1892 that a number of quails 
had been turned out in fields close to his house, with the only result, so 
far as he was aware, that one of them was subsequently killed by a reaping 
machine. Similar experiments have been made in other parts of the coun- 
try. Many years ago the late Mr Robert Mitford, of Hampstead, turned 
out a number of bought quails to the north of London in the expectation 
that some of them might breed, and provide some shooting in the autumn, 
but he was disappointed. 
Years ago Ireland was reckoned almost as good a country for quail as 
it has always been for snipe, and they were often to be found on the 
cultivated patches of the peasantry as well as on the edges of the bogs, as 
I know from experience in Kildare and Wicklow. But quail have been 
annually becoming scarcer for a long time past, and, in fact, were reported 
to have become practically extinct in 1892. Such at least was the opinion 
of a good observer in Ireland, Mr C. B. Moffat, who published an interest- 
ing article on the quail in Ireland in the “Irish Naturalist” for 1896. 
Curiously enough in 1892 quails began to reappear, and in 1893 and 
1896 there were some notable visitations. In each of those years there was 
very little rainfall in Ireland, and Mr Moffat wondered whether the drought 
had anything to do with their unexpected appearance, though it seemed 
to him “ more probable that the consequent sparseness of vegetation in 
their continental resorts might at such times drive the birds further 
afield in search of localities where covert and food are more attainable.” 
Mr Ussher, commenting on this article a few years later, pertinently 
inquired whether the particular seasons referred to partook of the same 
dry character throughout Western Europe, for “ the causes of an unusual 
* Col Hawker certainly did not find many quails in Hampshire In his day, for in the course of fifty years he shot no 
more than fifty-eight. See The Diary of Col Peter Hawker (1893), vol. ii, p. 356. 
t Borrer , of Sussex, p. 188. 
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