Red-billed Quelea

Art

taking a week off to deal with personal things and cleaning

Animal

Photo by Alastair Rae

The red-billed Quelea (Quelea quelea) is one of the world's most populace wild birds with an adult breeding population of 1.5 billion. They are found over most of sub-Saharan Africa excluding areas with dense rainforest. They can form flocks of over 1 million birds that will feed in a group. They will prey on insects during the breeding season but most of the year they tend to eat grass seeds. Red-billed quelea have been unpopular with agriculture for thousands of years as they occasionally will feed on farm fields in this manner stripping them of all of their grain. Due to their swarming behavior they are also called locust birds. People have used fairly extreme measures try to control them such as dynamite, fire bombs, acids, and all manner of poisons, farmers kill roughly 200 million of them a year, not to mention a lot of other things.

Video of a red-billed Quelea flock