Some of the people who eat the delicious game birds get sick from a toxin in the quails' fat and flesh. But there are several puzzling phenomena here, according to a detailed review by Louis Grivetti, a nutritional geographer at the University of California at Davis. European quail are toxic only while migrating, and even then, only some of the birds, some of the time. Quail using the eastern migratory flyway are toxic only during the southern, fall migration, while quail using the western flyway are toxic only during the northern, spring migration. There is also a strange patchy distribution of human poisonings, with cases reported from northern Algeria, southern France, mainland and island Greece, northeastern Turkey, and southwest Russia.
Scientists suggest a genetic susceptibility to whatever the toxin is.
The medical term for the effects of eating toxic quail is coturnism. The illness sounds dreadful, with a list of symptoms that includes vomiting, respiratory distress, excruciating pain, and paralysis, but it is seldom fatal except to elderly people. Conversely, children are said to get less severely sick than adults. But it takes from three to ten nasty days to get over the symptoms. Yet come next year, many victims willingly partake of the succulent dark meat.