The common quail (Coturnix coturnix), or European quail, is a small ground-nesting game

bird in the pheasant family Phasianidae. Coturnix is the Latin for this species.[2]

With its characteristic call of "wet my lips", this species of quail is more often heard than seen. It
is widespread in Europe and North Africa, and is categorised by the IUCN as "least concern". It
should not be confused with the Japanese quail, Coturnix japonica, native to Asia, which,
although visually similar, has a very distinct call. Like the Japanese quail, common quails are
sometimes kept as poultry.

This is a terrestrial species, feeding on seeds and insects on the ground. It is notoriously difficult
to see, keeping hidden in crops, and reluctant to fly, preferring to creep away instead. Even when
flushed, it keeps low and soon drops back into cover. Often the only indication of its presence is
the distinctive "wet-my-lips" repetitive song of the male. The call is uttered mostly in the
mornings, evenings and sometimes at night. It is a strongly migratory bird, unlike most game
birds.

Breeding
Upon attaining an age of 6–8 weeks, this quail breeds on open arable farmland and grassland the
west Palearctic including most of Europe , laying 6-12 eggs in a ground nest. The eggs take from
16–18 days to hatch.

Subspecies
This species was first described by Linnaeus in his Systema naturae in 1758 as Tetrao coturnix.[4]
The Eurasian subspecies, C. c. coturnix, overwinters southwards in Africa's Sahel and India. The
populations on Madeira and the Canary Islands belong to the nominate subspecies. The African
subspecies, C. c. africana, described by Temminck and Schlegel in 1849, is known as the
African quail. It overwinters in Africa, some moving northwards from South Africa. The
common quails of Madagascar and the Comoros belong to the same African subspecies, although
those found around Ethiopia make up a different subspecies, the Abyssinian quail, C. c.
erlangeri (Zedlitz, 1912). The fairly numerous[5] population of the Cape Verde islands belong to
a separate subspecies, C. c. inopinata, (described by Hartert in 1917), while those on the Azores
belong to subspecies C. c. conturbans (Hartert, 1920).