As usual, Moroccan IT engineer Yahya Tahoum, president of the Mokhtar Association for Hunting and Shooting, went out to practice his favorite hobby of hunting, during the hunting season that began on October 4 and lasts for two months.
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It was no surprise to him that he succeeded in hunting a quail, or what is known as "Salwa," as it is one of the migratory birds that land in Morocco during this time of year. But the surprise was in what one of the bird's legs carried, which was a small metal ring resembling a ring with letters and numbers on it.
Yahya could have ignored the ring or interpreted its existence with conspiratorial explanations, but the man, who works as an information engineer, could easily go back to the internet and use the data he found on the ring to find out that the bird had been encircled with it at the bird-flight center in Hedensee, in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany.
Yahya was not content with knowing the source of the ring, but was keen to contact them and inform them that the bird had been hunted in Morocco. Two days later, their response came to him, which was not just a confirmation of the ring’s identity, but rather served as a travel record for this bird.
His migration began on June 4, 2026, at 5 a.m., when he was spotted with the ring in the Greifswald-Wittenforstädt area, near the city of Greifswald in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in northeastern Germany. That is, the journey revealed by the ring did not begin in southern Europe, nor in a Mediterranean region, but began in northern Germany, near the Baltic Sea.
The European quail is not a bird that stays in one place. It is a migratory bird with a complex strategy, as some of its members migrate long distances, while the movement of other members varies.
The European Migration Atlas shows that quail populations breeding in northwest and western Europe migrate southwest, with birds recorded in southern France and Spain, as far as Morocco. The atlas data also indicates that the routes are not entirely fixed; they can vary from bird to bird and from year to year.
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