Azavatone
Chirping
OK. I've got my Amazon box (plastic lined) Habitrail Quail-i-torium going along and in my latest batch of quail-lings, I've got mid-40s of week+ old flappy buggers with their flying feathers coming in right now and they are starting to evade the heat lamp. It's at this time when I am moving my 3 mature flappers into their own small-ish open box and moving the 40+ into the open lined box with climbing boxes, a 3.5 foot long overpass (poop-ramp) to another box which has other stairs off to another open area. I noticed how quail chicks love to have their hoppy flappy spaz sessions and thought an overpass like this would be fun for them and this is the 3rd batch who seems to have no problem hopping up the stairs and loving it.
OK. So easy transfer of the 40+ babies into the expanda-cage/box and the 3 adults stopped using all that space so they actually seem to prefer the smaller but open top box. So, no problem or concern there. What I thought would be a good idea next was to see if the adults could be pre-acclimated to the chicks so that when the chicks get larger, they aren't pecked at. In the past, I made a careful little 2.5" square extension tube and cut holes into the boxes so that only smaller birds could choose to go from their box into the adult box and it couldn't go that other way. Weeeeeell, that was a stupid idea because I lost 2 chicks that were pecked by some of the adults when I was not looking. In the back of the mind and with my experience with mammals (baboons, cheetahs, warthogs, etc…) I'm expecting that as soon as a male enters puberty, it's DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER and "MUST MURDER ALL OFFSPRING". That the female will be nurturing and the male will be "can't get laid enough and I have all this testosterone so I must make everything else's life miserable." You should see baboons who walk 5km each to stand at opposite sides of water hole just to yell at each other… all night. But that's another story.
What surprised me was that when I put one of the adult quail hens on the overpass to meet some of the new chicks, she would start pecking at them. But the male, the polite-ish horndog that he is, is great with the chicks. That made me think that I had one bloodied male jump out of the boxes in the garage twice. His head was pecked bloody. When I put him back in and he tried to be Captain extra super mega horndog, the hens ran him off and started going straight for his head. He jumped right out of the box right in front of me.
Now, I just took the other hen and placed her with the 40+ chicks and she was timid and overwhelmed but not angry and pecky. On the overpass, she was timid as chicks wanted to crowd around her. I didn't leave her there long enough to see if she got tired of them and started pecking.
I don't know if this carries over to quail but ostriches are incubated by the dad at night and it's dad who can be seen walking the kids around. with my ostrich, she was probably abandoned by the father for being a runt of the litter or she just wandered off at 3 days old. Is there any rule with quail or other birds where males may be more accepting of chicks and it's more likely to be females who are unwelcoming or is it just hit and miss?
Thanks.
OK. So easy transfer of the 40+ babies into the expanda-cage/box and the 3 adults stopped using all that space so they actually seem to prefer the smaller but open top box. So, no problem or concern there. What I thought would be a good idea next was to see if the adults could be pre-acclimated to the chicks so that when the chicks get larger, they aren't pecked at. In the past, I made a careful little 2.5" square extension tube and cut holes into the boxes so that only smaller birds could choose to go from their box into the adult box and it couldn't go that other way. Weeeeeell, that was a stupid idea because I lost 2 chicks that were pecked by some of the adults when I was not looking. In the back of the mind and with my experience with mammals (baboons, cheetahs, warthogs, etc…) I'm expecting that as soon as a male enters puberty, it's DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER and "MUST MURDER ALL OFFSPRING". That the female will be nurturing and the male will be "can't get laid enough and I have all this testosterone so I must make everything else's life miserable." You should see baboons who walk 5km each to stand at opposite sides of water hole just to yell at each other… all night. But that's another story.
What surprised me was that when I put one of the adult quail hens on the overpass to meet some of the new chicks, she would start pecking at them. But the male, the polite-ish horndog that he is, is great with the chicks. That made me think that I had one bloodied male jump out of the boxes in the garage twice. His head was pecked bloody. When I put him back in and he tried to be Captain extra super mega horndog, the hens ran him off and started going straight for his head. He jumped right out of the box right in front of me.
Now, I just took the other hen and placed her with the 40+ chicks and she was timid and overwhelmed but not angry and pecky. On the overpass, she was timid as chicks wanted to crowd around her. I didn't leave her there long enough to see if she got tired of them and started pecking.
I don't know if this carries over to quail but ostriches are incubated by the dad at night and it's dad who can be seen walking the kids around. with my ostrich, she was probably abandoned by the father for being a runt of the litter or she just wandered off at 3 days old. Is there any rule with quail or other birds where males may be more accepting of chicks and it's more likely to be females who are unwelcoming or is it just hit and miss?
Thanks.
