Red-billed quelea collected from under large roosts in Nigeria and used as a fertiliser. Tourists like to watch the large flocks of queleas, such as during visits of the Kruger National Park. The birds themselves eat pest insects such as migratory locusts, and the moth species "Helicoverpa armigera" and "Spodoptera exempta". The animal's large distribution and population resulted in a conservation status listed as least concern on the IUCN Red List. The red-billed quelea is sometimes kept and bred in captivity by hobbyists. It thrives if kept in large and high cages, with space to fly to minimise the risk of obesity.
Red-billed quelea during flooding. It needs shrubs, reeds or trees to nest and roost. Red-billed queleas migrate seasonally over long distances in anticipation of the availability of their main natural food source, seeds of annual grasses. The presence of these grass seeds is the result of the beginning of rains weeks earlier, and the rainfall varies in a seasonal geographic pattern. The temporarily wet areas do not form a single zone that periodically moves back and forth across the entirety of Sub-Saharan Africa, but rather consist of five or six regions, within which the wet areas "move" or "jump". Red-billed quelea populations