Bog Myrtle & Peat

A quail called from the willow green shimmer of the newly bearding barley. I’ve heard that sound before, but never in Galloway where the chances of finding such birds are something close to zero. Only the smallest handful of quail come here from their wintering grounds in Africa, and they rarely go much further north or west – we’re on the outer limits of their range, and the countryside here flickers on the brink of suitability. This was a commercial cereal crop, with nothing much to show for itself in biodiversity terms. Perhaps it’s linked to some nicer, rougher boggy areas nearby, but there are no concessions to quail in farming terms. Besides, concessions would make no sense for a species which sometimes doesn’t come to Scotland at all – even in the best of years, only a couple of dozen quail are heard calling in the vast expanse of land from Berwick to Stranraer.

So few birds come this far north that there’s very little data on what they’re doing here. We have no real idea if they’re breeding successfully or sustaining their population, but a preference for nesting in cereal crops probably implies that they’re not. After all, many of the drivers which led to the loss of partridges and harvest mice will surely have done for quail over the years, and while eggs or chicks are sometimes found, there’s almost no evidence of fledging success and the establishment of stable populations. In fact, it’s possible that away from a few traditional “quail places”, many come here by mistake. They’ve taken a punt or are simply overshooting the mark of better and more productive places in mainland Europe. Fingers burnt, the chances are those individuals simply head south again when the full extent of their mistake is revealed.

There’s not much room for quail in the local headspace. People aren’t aware of the birds, and even if the calls are heard (and recognised) on these long summer days, perhaps the assumption is simply that a quail has escaped from captivity. Like many farmland species, it’s probable that quail were more common “in the old days”, but we don’t look back with dewy eyes and remember when there was a quail in every field and how the world was better then. Even in their supposed heyday when the fields were cropped by horses and scythes, the poet John Clare was baffled by his encounter with a quail, writing:

“Among the stranger birds they feed,
Their summer flight is short and low;
There’s very few know where they breed,
And scarcely any where they go”

For better or worse, my imagination was drawn to Clare’s England as I listened to that quail on a hot afternoon in the grip of July. I couldn’t see the bird, but as he crept through the barley roots thirty feet away, the rising stems sometimes bumped and wobbled to show that he was more than just a noise. The call dripped between the slitter of grasshoppers and heavy bees, unfamiliar but not out of place between the dykes. I reckoned it would have worked well against the rasp of a corncrake or the skirl of a grey partridge; a sound from the past, but nothing to substantiate my sense of nostalgia.

At a pinch, I began to pair John Clare’s poem with the memory of a Thomas Bewick woodcut featuring a creeping quail. And in my imagination, the birds began to feel like they belonged to a rural dream from centuries ago. In the absence of ecological data to support my encounter with a quail, emotional associations felt wholly insubstantial, like a rumour of something that used to exist – but when it was finally pinned down to the point of confirmation, it dodged the question and only pointed to more possibilities without making eye contact.

When birds are scarce, it’s my instinct to offer help. I wish I could simply enjoy the world for what it is, but I’m cursed with the modern urge to worry and restore. However, beyond a wider move towards sustainable farming which may or may not help quail, it’s useful to realise that there’s nothing much we can do for these birds in Galloway. And in a pattern of birds and wildlife which rises and falls within a predictable margin of seasonality, quail are a useful spanner-in-the-works. They might come according to weather patterns and harvests in Europe and Africa, but they’re just as likely to stay away altogether. In that sense, I think of them as a spillage, like the ringmark of a pint that’s being drunk somewhere else. Instead of reaching to fret and grey my hair over the status of quail in Galloway, perhaps the experience was simply a lesson in pleasure for the sake of itself – and a reminder that the fields in this glen are only a small and often underwhelming part of a wider, richer world.