What do you feed your quail?

dc3085 said:

I've only raised a couple hundred buttons, what do I know?

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Probably quite a bit about buttons, but I'm curious as to what sort of an environment you keep or kept them in? Cage size, pairs, trios or other, feed, outside or inside, wire bottom or what kind of bedding, what's in the cages, how strong is the light where they are kept and how long each day do they have light, can the different pairs or groups hear each other and so on.. Guess all of that and more might be factors that influence their willingness to incubate their own eggs.

DK newbie said:

Probably quite a bit about buttons, but I'm curious as to what sort of an environment you keep or kept them in? Cage size, pairs, trios or other, feed, outside or inside, wire bottom or what kind of bedding, what's in the cages, how strong is the light where they are kept and how long each day do they have light, can the different pairs or groups hear each other and so on.. Guess all of that and more might be factors that influence their willingness to incubate their own eggs.

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Everyone new to quail thinks that they will be the ones that reinvent the wheel. Cage raised quail don't brood with any sort of reliability, and this isn't just an opinion or the result of my personal experience, it's widely accepted knowledge in the quail world, look around. Button quail are the only birds left that do it with any sort of frequency and you'll often find they stop short of hatching, have no parental skills, abandon or attack the chicks etc. Just because a birds sits on eggs doesn't mean it will hatch them or even know what to do if it does.

I kept buttons in all sorts of cages trying to improve their chances, it matters very little it would seem. Imagine this 3'x4' cage full of cover, I had four of these and kept my most promising pairs of buttons in them. Made no difference to them brooding or not.


The rest were in smaller units, but environment doesn't play as much as you think it does, I'd guess of the half dozen or so pairs I had brood that more did it in the smaller cages than the larger ones . Of the buttons I've owned that brooded eggs, the most successful parents lived in a converted finch cage in my mom's living room.

You cant compare buttons to proper quail..... Buttons really aint even Quail at all...... They're more like a fat finch that dont like to fly....... .

I don't know...I had one that used to live with the finches that did a passable job flying like one when it got out. Must have made it most of a hundred yards before I never saw it again

I just got a pair of button quail, I've gotten pretty much an egg a day. They eat manna pro game bird food plus cockatiel food from www.mysafebirdstore.com