MODE OF TAKING.--There are several different methods of taking quails, but I shall only mention the commonest and easiest. The male birds are generally caught in a net, called a quail-net, by means of a call which imitates the cry of the female in the breeding season; it is the way adopted by bird-catchers in the spring, when they wish to take a male that sings in a superior manner, that is, which repeats a dozen times following the syllables "_pieveroie_." If the male has not yet met with a mate, and if he has not been rendered suspicious by some unskilful bird-catcher, he will run eagerly into the snare. The most important thing is to have a good call; they may be had cheap of turners at Nuremberg, who make them of leather, with a pipe turned from the bone of a cat or hare, or the leg of a stork; but they may easily be made by any body. The first thing necessary is a piece of calf-skin, one foot in length, and four inches in breadth, the sides must be sewed together within two inches of the end, and the bottom filled with a piece of wood an inch and a half in length, and rings composed of thick leather, the diameter of the interior opening not exceeding an inch and a half, are pushed into the sewed cylinder, and kept about a quarter of an inch apart; the whole may afterwards be pressed close together, making the rings touch each other; then a tube made of the bone of a goose or hare, and filled at the end like a common whistle, is fastened to the part of the cylinder left unsewed; the interior is then stopped with wax near the notch on the side of the leather, and a hole pierced through it with a knitting-needle; the upper part of the tube must also be stopped with wax, and lastly, the lower part, which is thus become a kind of whistle, is very firmly tied to the unsewn part of the cylinder. When the call is to be used, the lower end must be held firmly in one hand, and the leather cylinder worked up and down with the other, making the rings approach and separate, which produces the notes of the female, "_peuk, peuk, pupu_."