Red-billed quelea trees during the moonless period each night. The feathers were plucked and the carcasses fried the following morning, dried in the sun, and transported to the city to be sold on the market. The Sara people use standing fishing nets with a very fine mesh, while Masa and Musgum fishermen cast nets over groups of birds. The impact of hunting on the quelea population (about 200 million individuals in the Lake Chad Basin) is deemed insignificant. Woven traps made from star grass ("Cynodon nlemfuensis") are used to catch hundreds of these birds daily in the Kondoa District, Tanzania. Guano is
Red-billed quelea "aethiopica". Linnaeus himself did not explain the name "quelea". "Quelea quelea" is locally called "kwelea domo-jekundu" in Swahili, "enzunge" in Kwangali, "chimokoto" in Shona, "inyonyane" in Siswati, "thaha" in Sesotho and "ndzheyana" in the Tsonga language. M.W. Jeffreys suggested that the term came from medieval Latin "qualea", meaning "quail", linking the prodigious numbers of queleas to the hordes of quail that fed the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt. The subspecies "lathamii" is probably named in honor of the ornithologist John Latham. The name of the subspecies "aethiopica" refers to Ethiopia, and its type was collected in the neighbouring Sennar