Quail

Quail (coturnix coturnix) occupies all Europe, the western part of Asia and the biggest part of Africa. The territory of Belarus completely enters in the natural habitat of this kind. A little bit more often birds are marked in southern areas of republic, but their number can change very strongly on years even in the same land. Quail prefers dry open spaces. Most willingly it occupies upland meadows with not too dense and high herbage and fields grain. Rather often it meets among crops of fodder grasses, on potato fields. Quail can live also on inundated meadows, especially if they are not too humidified or there has passed land improvement. Sometimes it is possible to hear it on extensive wood glades, overgrown with grass. Quail is the bird of passage, the unique representative of gallinaceous birds, going to winter in southern lands. In the spring it arrives enough late, in the middle of May, among the number of the latest migrants. Only in the years of the earliest spring the quail appears in the first days of May. Unlike some southern regions of the country where a quail was popular object of hunting since olden times, in Belarus it is extracted in the limited quantity. One of the main reasons of it is its small number owing to what hunting is ineffective.