Quail

We are raising quail for eggs and meat. These are Coturnix quail and are amazingly efficient converters of feed to food. They begin laying eggs at 6 weeks of age, each hen laying 300 eggs a year and are ready to proccess for meat at 8 weeks old.

We raised these Coturnix (aka Japanese Quail) for awhile nearly 30 years ago, and they are delish! Since then, we have discovered through selective breeding these quail mature to nearly a lb. apiece. When we had them back in the eighties, the largest weighed in at maybe 10 oz. Also, they come in more color variations now, including the Texas A & M, developed by that university as a white meat quail. So when a friend gave us an incubator, we decided to grow us some quail. We started this project a mere seven weeks ago.

This is a batch of two day old quail. They are a bit smaller than golf balls.

I bought the first set of eggs from Ebay-50 Jumbo Browns and 50 A & M's. Here are the first hatchlings. I'm using a still air Hovabator and turn the eggs by hand three times a day, which keeps the embryos from sticking to the sides. It's a bit hard to tell from this pic shot through the incubator window, but I've marked the eggs with an X on one side and an O on the other, so I can see that I've turned them. After fourteen days of 101 degree temps and 45-50% humidity, I stopped turning, added more water to the incubator to increase humidity and by the 17th day we had 55 baby quail. This is not a bad percentage for eggs shipped in the heat and incubated in a still air (no fan). We should do much better when we are setting our own eggs, but we are establishing our breeding stock here.

The babies must be kept warm until they feather out. We brooded them for two weeks under a heat lamp while Bill built their grow out pen.

Here they are at three weeks old. They are raised on wire so the poo falls through (fertilizer!) and the pen stays clean.

Rabbit feeders allow us to easily provide feed from the outside of the pen.

My genius husband designed this watering system. We can flush it out by removing the lid. To add new water, we close the valve until the bucket is full and the lid is on, creating a vacuum.

Just after the first babies hatched, I ordered eggs from a different Ebayer to give us more diversity in our breeding stock. Forty-nine of these went into outside pens at a week old, because it is so warm now.

One week old quail chicks. They grow so fast!

I call them quailey-poo, Adam calls them critters, Bill calls them dinner!