December 8, 2016 at 2:39 pm

The Red Billed Que;ea. which is basically a inhabitant of African continent is found in south of Sahara and other grassland areas and is considered the ‘feathered locust’.One flock of these small sparrow like birds have the capacity to destroy a whole field of crops recking damage as a plague of locusts. The important feature of this bird is the size of its population. The flocks are gigantic and often will be there in tens of thousands or even millions. These groups combined can destroy 30-50 percent of the crops in a few days or even the whole lot itself. Therefore it is not a surprise that their second name is ‘Locust Bird’. They live and nest in huge massive colonies and may consist of upto  easily ten million nests over areas extending around 10 Sq. Km.

In the whole world the population of this locust bird may extend to even more than 100,000 million. They can easily compete for the title one of the worlds most numerous bird. They like eating seeds of wild grasses but due to their massive population they exhaust their natural food and end up devouring grains of fields being cultivated by the farmers. They consume rice, maize, corn, wheat and other ripened seeds in the fields. They are a big source of crop loss and are a cause of economic doom for the farmers of Aftica who depend on a good food harvest as majority of the nations are a agrarian economy.

Various methods have been used by humans in this man versus nature conflict and these birds were tried to be eliminated using different methods like, dynamiting, use of flame throwers, spraying the nests and roosts with even poison but nothing happened to them as they regrew very fast due to their population which is in millions and they are able to breed fast. In one year more than 150 million of these birds were eliminated to save the crops in South Africa alone but amazingly that has had no effect on the species or their population size. The amount of damage done by these birds to the crops also did not reduce in the subsequent years. This species of birds which are large in number and have a voracious appetite are so destructive for not only humans agriculture business but the plants themselves or the fields of crops like those mentioned above or cereals that it is very difficult to control their population and over population leads to destruction of economies.

They are of a length of 12 to 13 cm and have a weight of only 15 gm. Its colonies are vast and nests have a shape of oval and are build of grasses in thorn and acacia trees. The number of eggs they lay is around 2 to 4 eggs and they incubate in just a span of 12 days which is very fast and have a life time of about one and half years. Migration is an important process for their birds to search for food and it depends on the rainfall pattern, having a capacity to fly up to 1600 Km in search of crops ripened by rainfall or by the method of irrigation.

Here in this case humans are killing these birds for their own survival and their protecting their own economies and it proves to be a case of surivival of the fittest and the Red Billed Quelea has survived the this test.