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TURNIX AFRICANUS, Desf.
Andalusian Turnix.

Turnix africanus, Desfont. Mém. de |’Acad. des Sci., 1789, p. 500.

sylvaticus, Desf. ibid.

Tetrao gibraltaricus et T. andalusicus, Gmel. edit. Linn. Syst. Nat., tom. i. p. 766.
Turniz andalusica, Bonn. Ency. Méth., Orn., part 1.

Perdix gibraltarica et P. andalusica, Lath. Ind. Orn., vol. ii. p. 656.

Hemipodius tachydromus et H. lunulatus, Temm. Man. d’Orn., 1815, pp. 314, 315.
———  andalusicus, Boie, Isis, 1822, p. 558

Ortygis andalusica, Keys. et Blas. Wirbelth. Eur., p. 66.

Turmie sylvatica, Desf., Gould in Proc. of Zool. Soc. 1866, p. 210.

 

 

Ix the warmer portions of the Old World there occurs a group of small birds which have been classed, and
perhaps correctly, with the Gadinacee ; in size they resemble the Quails ; some of the species are a little
larger than those birds, and others much smaller. They are all solitary in their habits, and never go in
covies or bevies; some have stout rather heavy bills, while in others this organ is slender and longer than
in any other Gallinaceous birds of the same size. These, the Zurnices or Hemipodes, have, as the latter
name implies, but three toes, while, as is well known, the Quails, Partridges, &c. have a fourth generally
well developed hind one ; they all have short rounded wings, and rise with a loud whirring noise from the
arid and scrubby plains they frequent. The females, which are by far the largest in size, and the finest in
the colouring and distinctness of their markings, invariably lay four eggs in a slight depression of the ground,
with little or no nest. Their flesh is dry and not very good for the table, although they are often pocketed by
sportsmen and taken home as bush-game.

Of this group of birds many species inhabit India, China, the Philippines, Java, and Australia, and some
Africa, one of which, the bird represented on the opposite Plate, has two or three times been killed in
England ; hence arises the necessity for giving it a place in the Birds of Great Britain. The circumstances
under which it has a claim to be included in our avifauna are briefly these :—

In the month of November 1844, Mr. Thomas Goatley, of Chipping Norton, in Oxfordshire, sent a com-
munication to the ‘ Annals and Magazine of Natural History,’ in which he stated that he had lately received
a bird which appeared to be new to this country,—a Quail having no hind toe, and not mentioned, he believed,
in any work on British ornithology to which he had access, but which appeared to agree with Latham’s
description of Perdix gibraltaricus. The bird was shot on the Cornwall estate, about three miles from
Chipping Norton, in a field of barley, on the 29th of the previous October, after which date another was
killed near the same spot by the same person ; but its head was shot off, and it was otherwise so mutilated
as to be unfit for preservation. This might probably have completed the pair, the former being a male. It
had in its gizzard two or three husks of barley, several small seeds like charlock, and some particles of
gravel, and was very fat. It was considerably injured by the shot ; but Mr. Goatley had it set up, and justly
considered it as a valuable addition to his small collection of British birds. The above is the specimen the
occurrence of with is noted in the ‘ Zoologist’ for 1845, p- 872, and of which a woodcut is given at page
989 of the same volume ; it was also the subject of the article “ Andalusian Hemipode,” in the supplement
to Mr. Yarrell’s ‘ History of British Birds,’ p. 43. It remained the solitary example of the occurrence of the
bird in our islands until the year 1565, when Alfred Beaumont, Esq., exhibited, at the Meeting of the
Huddersfield Naturalists’ Society held on the 21st of June, an example which was taken alive at Fartown, near
Huddersfield. This specimen Mr. Beaumont kindly sent up for my inspection accompanied by the following
note :—‘‘ The bird was purchased alive by the son of S. D. Mosley, a birdstuffer of Huddersfield, from two
Irishmen on the 7th of April, 1865, near the Fartown bar on the Bradford Road. He saw it in the hand
of one of the men, and thinking it a novelty gave them sixpence for it; the Irishmen regarded it as a
young Partridge.”

Considerable confusion appears to exist respecting this bird in the works of the earlier writers, by whom
it was characterized as two distinct species; this is now known to be an error, since only one bird of
this form is found in Europe and on the opposite coast of Barbary. According to Latham, ‘it occurs in
considerable numbers in all the environs of the Garrison of Gibraltar, but not upon any part of the Rock itself.
It appears at the same time as the Common Quail, and continues there throughout the winter and spring, but
about the breeding-time disappears for the summer; yet there is no reason to suppose that it quits the