QUAILS : AN INTERNATIONAL QUESTION.
[TO TIM EDITOR 01 THE "SPECTATOR."] SLE.—The subject of the flight of the quail, touched on lucidly in the Spectator of January 21st, will be better under- stood when we know that the most potent cause of the diminution in the migration is in the netting of the shores from which they take flight in the spring. When I first went to Italy in 1861, the coast of the peninsula was fenced in for hundreds of miles by the nets set to catch the quails. But as a large proportion of the birds passed over them, there was not the destruction which has lately obtained by the netting of the African coast from which they start. The Italian Government, which is better in its intentions than in the enforcement of its regulations, has forbidden the quail nets, and they are now only found where the law is disregarded. There is, I believe, though I cannot get at the text of it, a Convention between Italy and the Central Powers debarring the setting of nets to interfere with bird migration across the Mediterranean, and it is largely respected on the Italian coasts. What is now wanted is a similar prohibi- tion of the netting of the North African shores, and it would be a disgrace if the Egyptian authorities were to show themselves less enlightened than the Italian. The most pitiful thing I know in bird-life is to see the poor little creatures, weary with a flight of perhaps three hundred miles, fall into the net spread for them as they touch, exhausted, the goal of their labours. I used, when living in Rome in the sixties, to shoot them along the shores of Antium and Terracina, but this sight sickened me of the murder, and I could no more hoot a quail on the shore of his quest than I could have delivered up a political prisoner to the Papal police. The poor little creatures if they escaped the nets fell into the grass so exhausted that they would not rise till the sportsman stirred them up with his foot to get them on the wing. They had no chance. But the net and gun combined did not make such havoc with the quails as the nets along the African shores.—I am, Sir, Sze., W. J. STEELMAN.
Candercum, W. Bournemouth, January 3rd.
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