s 
Facts About Quail Breeding 
stopped. But while the insect life lasts, 
and your patches of oats or buckwheat 
hold out, you cannot expect to central¬ 
ize them very much. A little later you 
can build your traps and make ready 
to catch what you need. 
A small flock of quail that I reared a 
ear ago never went more than a few 
undred yards from the feeding station 
and not one bird was missed between 
October and May. The winter yard 
for your breeding stock should, of 
course, be as large as possible, for it is 
occupied from the end of July until 
April. 
In regard to feeding the young birds, 
this subject has been well covered in 
Mr. Job’s book, but I will state 
briefly the method which I have used 
and found successful. For the old 
stock, almost any mixture of grain, 
cracked corn, wheat, kaffir corn, split 
peas, oats, etc., with green feed twice 
a week when possible, and a slightly 
more stimulating ration, including 
ant’s eggs and Spratt’s crissel during 
the laying season. 
The Chick's Diet 
For the young birds, about as 
follows: First week , custard and Spratt’s 
pheasant meal,—say one part custard 
to three parts meal. Boil the custard 
until it is thoroughly set, and steam 
the pheasant meal for half an hour. 
Chop the custard very fine, mix it 
with boiled meal, and feed four times 
a day a very little at a time, on a 
perfectly clean board. 
Second week. Hard boiled egg and 
steamed pheasant meal, about one 
part to four. By this time the young 
birds will be following the hen around 
the cellar wire yard and getting an 
abundance of insect food. They will 
even tackle huge grasshoppers, which 
they can hardly hold in their bills. 
At the third week , feed hard-boiled 
eggs, pheasant meal, and Spratt’s 
chick grain, mixing the pheasant meal 
and chick grain together before steam¬ 
ing. Use about one egg for five litters 
of quail, the feed should be mealy and 
not soft and sloppy, and the food 
should never be allowed to stand 
around unused. This mixture can be 
fed until the birds are about ten 
weeks old, and then they can be started 
on a variety of small grains twice a 
day. 
For starting quail on tracts of land 
where no wild breeding stock exists, 
it is far better to go to a little trouble 
and hand-rear your birds. A dozen 
young birds raised on your land are 
worth a hundred adult wild birds 
simply turned loose. Thousands of 
dollars have been wasted in buying 
and turning out adult quail, and only 
very rarely do we hear good results 
reported. My own experiments in 
this line have always been total 
failures. 
This sketch was not intended to be 
an exhaustive account of quail breeding; 
it was meant only to show the pos¬ 
sibilities that now confront the ener¬ 
getic sportsman. Thousands of acres 
of farm lands in southern New England 
are adapted to quail rearing, and the 
business man with comparatively little 
trouble and expense could have 
abundant sport near home. 
So far as I can see, pheasant and 
quail rearing can be carried on side by - 
side, but when a good stock of quail 
has been reared and is properly looked 
after, it might not be necessary to 
hand-rear large numbers of them 
every year. Quail are splendid mothers, 
and can be depended upon to raise 
large families. All that is necessary is 
to provide patches of oats and buck¬ 
wheat, and keep down stray cats and 
other enemies. 
Let us then face this subject of 
diminishing game supply by direct 
attack rather than by multiplication of 
laws. It is up to the sportsmen them¬ 
selves to see that the irresponsible 
shooters do not put an end to all sport 
by so annoying the land-owners that 
they are obliged to go to extremes. 
Only the other day a farmer told me 
that he had given up working in his 
field during the open season because 
he was not safe there. In some cases 
town societies have united to post a 
whole town, and not without reason. 
A state of affairs like this is unfair, 
unnatural, and cannot last. 
