Quails

Aren’t they the cutest little things? We’re getting better at it – we hatched five this time. First time we put a dozen fertile quail eggs under a clucky bantam chook. She sat diligently, hatched all of them, then systematically murdered them one by one.

Quail mothers are notoriously bad at sitting, so second and third time we put the eggs in an incubator, hatched six each time. But the hatchlings are so tiny, so frail, so bent on self-destruction. They will drown themselves in half an inch of water, get so wet that they die of hypothermia, splay their legs so they can’t stand up on newspaper or even paper towel, fill their food tray with poo, freak out at any noise, try to fly and bash their little heads on the lid of their box. We got three of the second lot and two of the third to adulthood.

But this time, I think we’ve cracked it. Five little quail chicks running around looking very healthy, one that died in the egg and one unfertilized egg. A tall box they can’t fly out of or bash their heads on the lid, a couple of inches of sand in the bottom of the box so they don’t do the splits, marbles in their water so they can’t fall into it, medicated high protein starter crumble in bottle caps so they can’t poo in it, a warming lamp overnight, a slow introduction to the rest of the flock so they don’t fight to the death. These little ones will stay in their box inside until they are a couple of weeks old, then go out in the quail run with the others, but with a fence separating them till they all get used to each other.

Once they are past infancy though, they seem to go from being so frail you wonder how any survive, to being so robust you wonder they haven’t taken over the world. They need a good cage – delicious little birds will be vulnerable to cats, dogs, rats, foxes, owls, butcher birds – and they can fly so it needs a roof. They don’t perch so it doesn’t need height for that, but if spooked they will take off vertically. So a cage needs either to be low enough or high enough so they can’t break their necks smashing into the roof.

But in the right cage, they’re nicely suited to raising in suburbia. They need a lot less room than chooks and no crowing at dawn to upset the neighbours. The sounds they make are pleasant, woodland bird chirping calls. They need sand to dust bath in, and they aren’t as good at making compost as chooks, but in a deep litter cage they produce a decent amount of high quality fertilizer.

And meat, and eggs. We’re aiming to breed them for both meat and eggs, so far only eggs, but the eggs are good. They’re tiny – it takes three or four to equal a chook egg in a recipe, but there’s lots of them. Quail lay prolifically – 300 eggs a year, with a shorter moulting season than chooks. And the eggs are “richer”, with a higher yolk-to-white ratio. As meat animals, they have a high feed to meat conversion ratio, and the males need to be culled anyhow or they will fight to the death.

There’s some good science that quail eggs are very effective against hayfever, and possibly, probably other allergies too. So quail eggs belong in my #Garden Pharmacy series too.

The next challenge will be figuring out how to feed them exclusively, or at least mostly, with feed we can scavenge or produce at home. I’m gradually diluting the commercial crumble with garden fruit and greens, amaranth, millet and chia seeds, and worms from the worm farm, and planning on adding in duckweed, moringa and black soldier fly larve, aiming to transition them entirely over time to homemade food.

We’re relatively new to this though. Any tips appreciated!