Sexing Button Quail & Living Accomodations

[riveramblnc]

My fiance & I recently adopted 10 Buttons, we were told they were evenly split...male to female. But the ratio appears to be 7:3. Is it possible to segregate out 3 breeding pairs and have the rest of the males live together? We have our first egg in an incubator, I'm hoping for a girl. But we will see. The hard three to sex are our whites, one is much larger, but makes loud calls, could it be a female? The other two small ones definitely making the mating "whir" attributed to boys. If that is the case we might be 6:4.

These are my first hemipodes, but I have experience with other birds and my mother has a chicken army of her own.

 

[DK newbie]

At the pet store where I get new buttons, they keep all the males together in an aviary and all the females in another. So I guess it might work. But perhaps the males there are mainly young ones and thus less likely to fight, or the numbers (20-ish) prevents them from pecking on just one. I keep 4 males together right now. They were raised together, but one of them seems to have begun courting another which is not particularly appreciated and this causes a bit of running around sometimes. They live in a small aviary, so they have a little room to get away from each other, but I'm not sure it'll keep working as it gets warmer and breeding season approaches.
As for sexing.. Sorry, I have none that can't be sexed by the color of the vent feathers, so I haven't really had to study their behavior so much. You can try feeding them a bit of millet, bugs or similar treat, if a bird picks it up and offers it to another rather than eating it on its own, that bird is likely to be a male. Some say the males get a light ring around their pupil which the females don't, but I'm not convinced that this goes for all color morphs.

 

[riveramblnc]

Thank you! I have split the primary aggressor off with a female and their seems to be peace at the moment in the main cage. I think the two small whites I have are males. They "whir" but I can't get a definitive answer as to whether or not a female may do it also.

Meanwhile, we had our first egg layed, so it's in an incubator at the moment. Hoping for a girl!