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Here's a male redbilled quelea in breeding colours, seen in KTP in mid-February 2010.



Would this be considered a rare sighting?

I think something went awry in MM's post earlier regarding the estimated world-wide population of red-billed queleas. I believe the correct figure to be 1.5 billion birds, not 1500 billion. RBQs mainly eat seeds of cereals and grasses, supplemented with arthropods taken from vegetation and in flight. It is highly gregarious, living in flocks which can be have millions of birds, that can completely devastate cultivated areas. The sheer size of the biggest flocks is scary and even intimidates elephants that will evacuate an area when such a flock settles nearby.

In some areas, they are subjected to pest control measures, but even the destruction of more than 100 million birds in a year does not have an impact other than temporary relief for the crops in that area.

Like the common household pet, the budgie, they actually show more than one standard colour. This phenomenon is called polymorphism.

Hi JVR, lovely photo.

I too have read in "Where to bird in Kruger" that the population is 1500 billion birds. By far the highest of any species of bird in the world. An estimated 300million to every human being on earth.

Those who want to can double check the credibility of the book. For me personally, the figures are just too mind boggling.


These birds have one of the shortest breeding periods. The males build a nest within a day and the eggs hatch after 10 days.

Not sure what the population was when the book was written, but at the moment there are 7 billion people on earth. So if there were to be 300 million for every person, my calculations would point to something in the region of 2100 billion birds/human.

The Red-billed Quelea makes up more than half of Kruger's total avian mass.

Mind boggling.

The numbers I have read have always stuck with me as being a massive amount of birds. For sake of info here, from the book 'Prime Origins guide to best birding in Kruger' published 2005 and on page 146 is the following:

There are more Red-billed Queleas on earth than any other bird. Roberts VII estimate there are 1500 billion birds in the world. That's about 300 million birds for every human on the planet. Unsurprisingly, there are more Red-billed Queleas in Kruger than any other species, with an estimated 33.5 million moving seasonally in and around the Park. They account for 50% of the avian biomass in Kruger, moving in flocks of up to a million birds that nest en masse in acacia trees with between 50 and 3000 nests per tree.

OK, I see where the confusion comes from... I looked it up and you are right: Roberts (our bird bible) VII claims the global population to be 1 500 000 000 000 (1500 billion) birds. However, the IUCN Red List web site (and Birdlife International) do not list a population size, rather stating: The global population size has not been quantified.

The Avian Web thinks 1.5 billion is right, as does the BBC

Wiki has 10 billion as the right figure!

"The Red-billed Quelea (Quelea quelea) is the world's most abundant wild bird species, with an estimated adult breeding population of 1.5 billion pairs.[2] Some estimates of the overall population have been as large as 10 billion."

I'd love to know which is clostest to the truth as there is a 1000-fold difference between some of these figures, all from "reliable" sources!

Apologies to the Mouse for casting doubt on her take on the population size of Red-billed Queleas.

Being uncomfortable with inaccuracies such as presented by the population estimates for the quelea I thought my bird-ringing mentor and South Africa's leading authority on weavers, Dieter Oschadleus would be able to provide some guidance... He writes:

Understanding the biology of the quelea may help understand the difficulty of estimating quelea population size. For instance, many large colonies breed in inaccessible areas in Africa and the numbers breeding in different years would be different, based on environmental conditions. Because the global population is high, it is possible for there to be occasional large fluctuations in total numbers in different years or time periods (in addition to the inaccuracy of any estimates).

The short answer is that there are lots of quelea and all methods of population estimates are fraught with assumptions.

For total population, take your pick!