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Common Quail

Common Quail

Coturnix coturnix

Identify the Common Quail by sound or photo and log your sightings with Birdpass.

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The Common Quail is a small, secretive gamebird of open farmland and meadows, far more often heard than seen. Unusually for a gamebird, it is strongly migratory, breeding across Europe and western and central Asia and wintering in Africa and southern Asia. Males give a clear, repeated three-note whistle, “wet-my-lips”, especially at dusk and dawn. Numbers fluctuate greatly from year to year.

Did you know?

  • Eating quail has occasionally caused coturnism, a poisoning linked to plants the birds have eaten.
  • It is one of the few gamebirds that migrate long distances between Eurasia and Africa.

Voice

Song

About the species

Identification

A small, ground-dwelling gamebird with beige-brown upperparts heavily marked with dark patterning and pale longitudinal stripes. The male has a black centre to the throat (varying in extent), the female a dirty-white throat. The song is a loud, whistled “whit-wit-wit”, repeated quickly, which helps confirm its presence in dense vegetation. Much smaller than Grey Partridge.

Family

Phasianidae

Size

Medium (thrush)

Colours

brown, black, white

About the habitat

Open farmland with cereal and clover fields, hay meadows, fallow land and coastal meadows with dense ground vegetation; avoids forest and scrub.

Diet

Seeds of weeds and grain, green shoots, and small invertebrates such as beetles, bugs, ants and grasshoppers and their larvae.

Behaviour

Very skulking; keeps to crops and grass and prefers to run rather than fly. When flushed it bursts into low, fast flight on whirring wings and soon drops back into cover. It nests in a shallow scrape hidden in tall vegetation; the female incubates, and the downy chicks leave the nest soon after hatching.

Sources

Photo: KaouroV, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A common quail in Lebanon, crop.jpg

Sound: Carlo Fracasso, XC918973, CC0 1.0 https://xeno-canto.org/918973

Text: Wikipedia (English) + FinBIF species descriptions + Wikipedia (Finnish), CC BY-SA 4.0; FinBIF: CC BY 4.0; Wikipedia: CC BY-SA 4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_quail

See also