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Common quail
Coturnix coturnix | Kwartel | Codorniz común
A bird you hear a thousand times and hardly ever see. The Quail lives hidden in tall crops and betrays itself only by its three-note call, which rolls across the fields on warm June days and summer nights.
Voice
The song is the best-known three-note phrase of farmland, a clear and far-carrying wet-my-lips, repeated endlessly. Calling birds are most active at dusk and through the night, from mid May into August, and in invasion years the chorus comes from almost every cereal field.
Recording: Lawrence Shove — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Starling-sized, round and short-tailed, with cream lengthwise stripes over a marbled brown upperside. The male has a black anchor-shaped throat mark and a creamy crown stripe; the female is spotted on the breast with a plain pale throat. When flushed it whirrs away low and fast on narrow scythe-shaped wings and drops straight in again.
Confusion species
Only young Grey Partridges really mislead, and they are larger, longer-legged and lack the cream stripes along back and flanks. In flight the Quail is much smaller, glows warm sandy brown, shows none of the chestnut tail sides of a partridge, and covers a shorter, lower line before pitching down.
Habitat
Dense, herb-rich growth on dry ground: cereal fields, lucerne and clover leys, rough verges and extensively cut hay meadows. Avoids bare ground and wet soils. In southern Europe it also uses steppe-like arable land. Through the summer birds shift with the harvest to later-ripening fields.
Range and movements
Breeds from Iberia and North Africa deep into Russia and winters in the Sahel and around the Mediterranean. In the Netherlands it is a scarce summer visitor of arable districts, with numbers that swing wildly between years. Iberia holds large numbers and, in part, birds that stay all year.
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- Migration direction
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Drive along cereal fields on a still June evening and switch off the engine; males call hardest between sunset and midnight. Stay on the track and never walk into the crop: the bird simply runs off and will not show itself anyway.
Conservation status
Numbers fluctuate strongly but the long-term trend is downward, driven by field enlargement, early cutting, herbicides and the disappearance of lucerne and clover. Large numbers are still shot on migration around the Mediterranean, and the release of farmed quail brings an added risk of genetic mixing.