red-billed quelea
by Douglas J. Lanzo
millions of birds mirroring
shifting sands
Highly social, fast-breeding, migratory birds, red-billed quelea swarm for protection while feeding on a huge volume of grass seeds. Red quelea also avail themselves of grain-based farmer crops, leading them to refer derogatorily to the quelea as feathery locusts.
Intensive cereal crop farming in Africa in recent years has augmented the already mind-numbing sizes of these swarms, which often number in the millions. Some swarms have been estimated to surpass 40 million quelea.
Further reading:
To learn more about this incredible swarming behavior, check out the BBC One Planet Earth Plains documentary from 2009 at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00381fg, which captured what is claimed to be the largest flock of birds ever caught on camera, which represents only a small fraction of the 1.5 billion quelea that swarm over Africa’s savannah during their breeding season. Additional information on red-billed quelea can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-billed_quelea.
Author bio:
Doug is an award-winning American author and poet of over 530 internationally published poems whose debut novel The Year of the Bear won the Ames Award for YA Books and whose second book I Have Lived was named American Book Fest Novella of the Year. His Author’s website is www.douglaslanzo.com.