The bird’s cry of “_Bit by bit_,” and his mate’s reply, “_Wet my weet, Wet my weet_,” as we render it, is not often heard now in our own country. This is attributed by some to the fact that most of the Quail’s favourite feeding-grounds have been “improved” away. Fine pasture-lands are now where the ground was once coarse and covered with tussock, bent, thistles, burdock, hawkweed, and such plants as flourish in uncared-for lands, and in such surroundings the Quail delighted to remain. Now, only very few winter with us; the majority leave in October for the South. The Quail is an accomplished ventriloquist, and the late Lord Lilford, in his “Notes on the Birds of Northamptonshire,” says that he often heard a caged Quail calling when within a few feet of him, which yet gave the impression of being many yards distant. On the western side of Corfu he found numbers of these birds in the currant-vines on very steep hill-sides, and vast numbers are bred in the cultivated plains around and below Seville, where their numbers are thinned in the pairing season by a clever method of calling the birds into a net by imitating the call-note of the female. On the island of Capri, in the Bay of Naples, it is on record that as many as 160,000 have been netted in a single season. Many of us have eaten them in the South of France during the grape season. The birds can be caught by the hand when they have, as the French say, intoxicated themselves by feeding on the ripe grapes. During the winter and the early spring they feed on the seeds of the plantain, dock, vetch, and chickweed. Slugs also and insects help to form the bird’s diet. The Italian’s notion that it is unwholesome to eat Quails at a given season arises, no doubt, from the fact that it is pleasanter eating and the flesh is plumper at certain times of the year than at others, owing largely to the varying nature of the bird’s food.