Quails are nice little dumpy birds which we now see mostly when trussed and ready for cooking in the supermarkets or poulterers. Farmed, of course, great favourites on restaurant menus. Eric Dempsey and Michael O'Clery in their Complete Guide to Irish Birds, tell us that the quail is a scarce summer visitor, with small breeding populations based at traditional sites in midland counties. Some breeding, they say, may also take place in western, northern and southern regions. Lucky spotters. This pair of eyes never came across one in the wild.
Anyway, it's a bird with Biblical credentials. For twice the Lord gave quails to the Israelites, not in hundreds but thousands or tens of thousands: "at even, quail came up . . ." So many, indeed that the people were all day and all night and all the next day gathering the lot. Now it wasn't just in Biblical times that quails fell out of the sky and carpeted the ground. But much nearer to our own times, a French sporting writer could tell us this amazing news.
"Quails certainly fly long distances and as a species is very widespread. You find them in the north and in the Midi, in the middle of Russia and at the Cape of Good Hope. In some countries they come in immense numbers, and on the little Isle of Capri, in a normal year, 60,000 are taken, and sometimes this number is tripled. Salvador, in his History of the Institutions of the Hebrew People, says that quails can still be taken by hand on the same river banks where the Israelites received them in the time of their long sojourn in the desert. Oliver in his Voyage en Turquie reports the same. Even in France there are some parts of the Mediterranean shores where they fall, exhausted after a long flight onto the sand. "This is from a book called Chasses Gasconne, a re-edited version of a volume by J. P. Marion, first published in 1863.
Mrs Beeton's famous words first appeared in 1861. She also told of migrating quails covering island after island in the Mediterranean as they migrated. To cook them, she advised against drawing them, i.e. taking out their insides. Truss them, give them 20 minutes, with basting, before a hot fire and serve on toast.
And, irrelevantly, perhaps, we are told by Giraldus Cambrensie, who wrote of this country at the end of the 12th century: "Quail also is plentiful here". And what a splendid production is the Dolmen Press's edition of John J. O'Meara's vivid translation of that literary curiosity.