Quail dying! Help

Hi all!
We have around 7 corturnix quail
And 3 Californian (1 m 2 f) and this morning we found our female Californian quail dead and our male had taken himself upstairs in the run and died too in the corner. We have recently just cleaned their enclosure out and added new wood chippings. They are all 1.5 years old. Their enclosure is totally sealed from rats stoats snakes foxes etc and we have a large electric fence around the outside. We have recently just added chickens and ducks into this enclosure so could this be the reason? Could they have frightened them or spread disease? We just bought the chickens and ducks from a poultry auction and they are all very healthy. Please any advice is much appreciated

I might add the chickens are in their own house and cannot get into the quail house (just around the outside) so have not attacked them etc!

Chickens can look and act very healthy, but they can also harbor diseases that don't affect them, but will kill quail. Also, what sort of wood shavings did you use? Cedar will kill poultry.

There is no way to know if a chicken is healthy. There are no accurate tests for coryza, blackhead, MG or many other poultry diseases. I would suspect at this point you have a disease, unless you find one of the carcasses is mauled (like the chicken killed it).

Read through the link in my signature of common game bird diseases and try to match what symptoms you see in your quail with what you read. Watch especially for respiratory issues since many poultry diseases cause some sort of nasal congestion or breathing problems. Coryza is most common and often easiest to diagnose because after a few days of it they swell around the sinuses and you will notice a foul smell emitted from the sinus area.

If you have a poultry disease which isn't unlikely, depending on what it is, it can kill all of your quail if left untreated.

The link in my signature about not keeping chickens with quail will show some info on diagnosing coryza in quail as well.


Edit to add: Don't worry about the ducks they are resistant to most poultry diseases, waterfowl are only susceptible to a few waterfowl specific diseases.