Red-billed quelea sound due to the many wing beats. After arriving at the roost or nest site, birds keep moving around and make a lot of noise for about half an hour before settling in. Both males and females call. The male sings in short bursts, starting with some chatter, followed by a warbling "tweedle-toodle-tweedle". The red-billed quelea is mostly found in tropical and subtropical areas with a seasonal semi-arid climate, resulting in dry thornbush grassland, including the Sahel, and its distribution covers most of sub-Saharan Africa. It avoids forests, however, including miombo woodlands and rain forests such as those in central
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