A Well-Known Type Of Bird That Is Actually Poisonous

That seemingly harmless, pudgy little bird with the striped belly you see visiting your backyard from time to time or zipping across your favorite mountain trail, well, it harbors a dark family secret. One variety out of the nearly 130 kinds of quail found throughout the world can actually kill you. The common quail (Coturnix coturnix), also called the European quail, is a migratory species that breeds in Europe and Russia, but it spends the colder months south in Africa and India. To power its migrations of thousands of miles, this quail consumes seeds as fuel, including the seeds of hemlock – the incredibly deadly plant that poisoned Socrates. While the quail themselves are unperturbed by this poison, people who eat their meat at the wrong time of year are not so lucky.

A 2011 article in the Journal of Emergency Medicine describes four cases of quail poisoning in adult patients who'd recently eaten the birds during their dinner in Turkey. Due to the hemlock, the consumed quail caused a toxicological condition called "coturnism," which led to acute rhabdomyolysis. This condition can cause muscle weakness, pain, nausea and other serious symptoms such as kidney failure. In the fall 2005, a child in Greece ended up hospitalized for eight days with this illness, just five hours after eating quail. No deaths have been reported among these modern cases, but eating poisoned quail has been posited as the likely cause of a Biblical plague that killed the Israelites, and the Roman Empire was so worried about poisoning from quail that it prohibited eating the bird.

Quail aren't walking around all year as little poison bombs, and they're certainly not one of nature's most dangerous animals. Toxic coturnism appears to be unique to the European common quail, and it only seems to be a problem during fall migration. The type of quail you'll most often find on a fancy restaurant menu or in that high-end grocery store is the Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica), also called Coturnix quail. They're raised on farms for their meat, and therefore, they aren't migrating or eating the hemlock that will make you sick. Other quail species commonly farm-raised or kept by backyard poultry enthusiasts include the California quail, Gambel's quail, and the bobwhite, whose meat and eggs are all regarded as safe to eat. Simply avoid eating wild European common quail in the Mediterranean for your fall supper, and you're good to go to enjoy this delicacy. 

If your interest in quail isn't culinary, know that these little birds are quite harmless, including the six beautiful species native to North America. You can happily keep attracting these ground-feeding birds to your feeder without any worry. And if you see a covey in the wild, consider yourself lucky; even if poison hemlock doesn't affect their European cousins, habitat loss continues to see North American quail populations decline.