Every month, museum visitors choose the exhibit they liked the most. What they singled out for the month of September was the Common buttonquail or Andalusian hemipode (Turnix Sylvaticus). The common buttonquail is a small quail species, with a size of 15cm and a broad geographical distribution over much of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Unfortunately, it is the second European bird species which are extinct in Europe since 2018 and they lived only in Andalusia, Southern Spain. It usually frequents dry meadows with low vegetation, where nests on the ground, and rarely flies without reason, making it very difficult to observe. It is thought that a small population seems to live in Morocco. The reasons for the Spanish population’s extinction are mainly anthropogenic in combination with the destruction of their grassland habitat for agriculture.


    1/10/2022