Forgive my post title, it's the best I could come up with. I have been contemplating getting chickens for years, mostly for the eggs, but my recent move into a neighborhood with a HOA put the nail in that coffin. After some research, I've learned of the potential of Cortunix, and so I've decided to take the plunge. After a lot of debate, I'm starting to lean toward building my own cages. These will be about 36" x 18" of floorspace. I want my quail to be as happy as possible, and I'm not wanting to start big, so I plan on these being low-density units. Also, my wife isn't very keen on the idea, so I'm hoping this will keep the smell and mess down in my garage. I'd like to be able to track the egg production for each female to develop a good breeding line, and was wondering what is the best way to do this. I think dividing the cage would be helpful, but I'm unsure how to go about doing this. If I was to divide the cage into 3 partitions, would it be better to keep a breeding pair in each partition, or just keep one female in each partition, and rotate a male to a different partition each day (so the females are bred every three days). I'm leaning to the second way to avoid the females from being plucked bare by too much attention, but I've looked over the forum, and can't find anyone's experience rotating the male in such a way. It also seems it could stress the birds to have less of a daily routine, but it does sort of provide a healthy 1:3 ratio. Does anyone have any experience with this, or can anyone share their thoughts on this based on other experiences?