Quail?

[Pedro]

Two things that we can shoot but only do one are snipe and golden plover. In fact I don't know anyone who has ever shot golden plover. Although I have shot snipe, walked up, over dogs. But it was in Scotland about twenty-five plus years ago.

We get snipe on our shoot. There are two types in the UK, the common snipe and the jack snipe, which I believe is a winter visitor from Scandinavia and seems to turn up when the woodcock arrive. The common snipe is, um, most common and is found on marshy or boggy ground, where it feeds on insects that reside there. We have shot the occasional one. The jack snipe is smaller, but it's not easy to tell them apart in flight. Which is a problem as the jack snipe isn't on the quarry list.

 

[Mr. Gain]

I went on a quail hunt in southern Spain a few years back and thoroughly enjoyed it, especially when a big covey was flushed and there were birds going everywhere! Some coveys were 40 or more strong but would burst from a patch of cover just a couple of metres square. It took a while to get the lead right too, as the birds are so much smaller than partridges that it was easy to think they were a lot further away -and travelling faster- than they were. Some of the birds flushed were pretty clueless, whilst others seemed to know just how to use the light and the ground to get away. It wasn't long before I started leaving the duffers alone and trying to catch up with the smart chaps. This, and limiting myself to one shot per bird, made for great sport. (There were lots of birds.) The basic drill was to line the guns out across a field sown with a mixture of seed-bearing plants that would hold locally bred birds and attract passing migrants and intersperse them with beaters and dogs. The line would then advance, halt when a dog went on point and move on again after the flush once any shot birds had been retrieved. The open fields were quite unpredictable -which I enjoyed-, but the clumps of cistus bushes in the dry watercourses were often full of quail and generated some real anticipation as they produced some spectacular flushes.