Common quail

• 1. Introduction

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  The common quail, Coturnix coturnix, is a bird that almost no one sees, yet almost everyone who has spent a summer morning near European farmland has heard. That three-note chirp, repeated in quick succession three times, rises from the grasses and disappears before you can locate it. The bird itself is already gone, pressing low into the stems.

  This small brown creature weighs between 70 and 140 grams and measures no more than 18 centimetres from bill to tail. Yet it accomplishes something most of its closest relatives never attempt: a long annual migration between Europe and Africa. It is a game bird, a poultry bird, a biblical bird, and, under certain circumstances, a genuinely dangerous meal.

  How did a shy ground-nester end up on the tables of kings and in the texts of ancient scripture? And why does eating one sometimes put you in hospital? The answers live in the biology, the history, and the surprising toxicology of one of Europe's least-seen birds.

• 2. A Name and Its History

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  Carl Linnaeus formally placed the common quail in scientific literature in 1758, in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He gave it the binomial name Tetrao coturnix. The species epithet, coturnix, is simply the Latin word for quail, carrying the bird's name in a circle back to itself.

  Six years later, in 1764, the French naturalist Francois Alexandre Pierre de Garsault introduced the genus Coturnix, and the bird was moved into it. That is where it sits today. The genus name and the species name are now the same word, doubled: Coturnix coturnix.

  The English word "quail" itself has a tangled etymology. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces it to the late fourteenth century, appearing as a surname as early as the early fourteenth century. It likely arrived through Old French quaille, or possibly through Medieval Latin quaccula. Germanic roots are also plausible, given the similarity to Dutch kwartel, Old High German quahtala, and German Wachtel. The word may even have developed independently in English from Proto-Germanic roots. Either way, the name echoes the sound the bird makes, which is itself how most people encounter it.

  For much of its taxonomic history, the common quail was lumped together with the Japanese quail, Coturnix japonica. The two species look nearly identical. Where their ranges meet, near Lake Baikal and in Mongolia, they do not appear to interbreed. In captivity, crosses between the two produce offspring with reduced fertility. Those two facts together drove scientists to treat them as separate species, a distinction now widely accepted.

• 3. Built to Travel

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  Most birds in the pheasant family, Phasianidae, are short-winged birds suited to bursting into low flight for a few metres before dropping back to the ground. The common quail breaks that pattern. Its wings are notably long for a gamebird, shaped for sustained flight across continents.

  Breeding happens across the western Palearctic, a region stretching from Europe and northwest Africa east through Mongolia and into northern India. When the breeding season ends, birds from that vast range head south. The subspecies C. c. coturnix, described by Linnaeus himself, winters in Africa and in central and southern India. Other subspecies occupy more limited ranges: C. c. conturbans is confined to the Azores, described by Hartert in 1917; C. c. inopinata occupies the Cape Verde Islands, also described by Hartert in 1917; C. c. africana, named by Temminck and Schlegel in 1848, is found in sub-Saharan Africa and three islands; and C. c. erlangeri, named by Zedlitz in 1912, inhabits east and northeast Africa.

  Females are generally slightly heavier than males, and both sexes are at their heaviest just before migration, at the end of the breeding season. That extra weight is fuel. The bird needs every gram for the journey. An attempt to establish the species on the island of Mauritius has repeatedly failed, and the quail there is now probably extinct, which suggests the bird's migratory success is no guarantee of colonisation success in unfamiliar territory.

• 4. Life in the Grass

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  Males arrive in the breeding area before the females. In northern Europe, laying begins from the middle of May and can continue to the end of August if a female lays a repeat clutch. The nest itself is minimal: a shallow scrape in the ground, 7 to 13.5 centimetres in diameter, sparsely lined with vegetation.

  Eggs are laid at 24-hour intervals. A full clutch holds between 8 and 13 eggs, each with an off-white to creamy yellow background marked with dark brown spots or blotches. The average dimensions are 30 by 23 millimetres and each egg weighs around 8 grams. Incubation is carried out by the female alone, beginning only after all the eggs have been laid. They hatch together, synchronously, after 17 to 20 days.

  The chicks are precocial, meaning they leave the nest and begin feeding themselves very shortly after hatching. Their mother broods them while they are small, keeping them warm. Young birds fledge at around 19 days of age but remain within the family group for between 30 and 50 days. They typically do not breed until they are one year old, and they raise only a single brood per season.

  Outside the breeding season, the bird feeds on seeds, including weed seeds and cereal gleanings, along with insects such as beetles, true bugs, ants, earwigs, and orthopterans, plus their larvae. It feeds on the ground, hides in crops, and almost never volunteers to fly. When disturbed, it creeps away. Even if flushed into the air, it stays low and returns to cover quickly. The male's call, often described as sounding like "wet-my-lips", is heard mostly in mornings and evenings and sometimes at night.

• 5. Quail at the Royal Table

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  In 1537, Queen Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII and pregnant with the future King Edward VI, developed an intense craving for quail. The appetite was insatiable enough that courtiers and diplomats stationed abroad were ordered to locate sufficient supplies for the Queen.

  The common quail is heavily hunted as a game bird during its passage through the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean coast of Egypt is a particular chokepoint. During the autumn migration of 2012, an estimated 3.4 million birds were caught in nets in northern Sinai alone. For the whole of Egypt that same season, the estimated catch reached as high as 12.9 million birds.

  In more recent years, interest in raising common quail has grown among hobbyists in the United States and Europe, continuing a tradition of keeping them as poultry that the species shares with the Japanese quail. In parts of its range, however, such as Ireland, the wild population is declining.

• 6. The Danger of Coturnism

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  Quail meat is not always safe to eat. If a common quail has eaten certain plants before it is caught or killed, its flesh can become toxic to humans. The specific plants responsible remain a matter of scientific debate.

  The illness that follows is called coturnism. It is characterised by muscle soreness and can progress to kidney failure. One in four people who eat poisonous quail flesh becomes ill. The condition has been documented for long enough to warrant its own name, yet the mechanism behind it remains incompletely understood.

  The Book of Numbers in the Bible, chapter 11, describes a vast flock of quails blown by wind toward the Israelites in the wilderness, taken as meat. Some historians and scholars have noted the possible connection between mass quail consumption during migration and episodes of illness recorded in ancient sources, given that migrating birds pass through regions where toxic plants grow.