Red-billed Quelea

How to identify

Field marks

1. Adult male has red, thick, conical bill
2. Male in breeding season usually has black mask
3. Male has red eye-ring and rufous iris
4. Back with dark and pale brown streaks

Male, female and young

The female resembles the non-breeding male year-round, but its bill and eye-ring turn yellow in the breeding season; juveniles have a gray head and white cheeks.

Voice

The song starts with chattering, followed by “tweedle, toodle, tweedle”, and ends with a long, high-pitched whistle.

Similar species

Pin-tailed Whydah

The female Pin-tailed Whydah in non-breeding plumage is also a small bird resembling a Eurasian Tree Sparrow, with a red conical bill, but has a white supercilium between two black stripes.

Where and when it's recorded

Red-billed Quelea has been recorded at 454 of the 8,171 birding hotspots we track, in 42 countries and regions.

Records by month Southern Hemisphere

Where it's recorded most

1. Nairobi NPKenya595 records
2. Marievale Bird SanctuarySouth Africa525 records
3. Tarangire NPTanzania419 records

Countries and regions with the most records

South AfricaKenyaTanzaniaNamibiaUgandaSenegalEthiopiaZambia

eBird records via GBIF up to 2024-12-31. A record means someone listed it; more records partly mean more birders, not more birds.

About

The red-billed quelea (Quelea quelea), also known as the red-billed weaver or red-billed dioch, is a small, seasonally nomadic, sparrow-like bird of the weaver family, Ploceidae, native to sub-Saharan Africa.

Excerpt from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 · authors · Read more on Wikipedia

Questions