What weight to butcher quail at?

[CountryBoy47]

To the previous poster those birds are nowhere near full grown. Coturnix reach sexual maturity around 2 months old and aren't fully grown out for another couple months.

At 5-6 weeks you are going to feel like you wasted time an money butchering them. There is some meat on them but an average rule of thumb for cots is that carcass weight is about half of live weight.

With coturnix there is also a big misconception that 8 weeks is fully mature. That came from studies done on the growth curve of quail (all livestock has a growth curve) basically at 8 weeks the growth curve has reached its peak meaning any more weight gained comes at a loss of dollars due to feed cost. If you aren't selling carcasses or tight on money you can disregard that rule. I personally butcher closer to 12 weeks. A 12 week old bird is substantially larger than an 8 week old bird and Im in it for the meat so I always go to at least 10 weeks.

i know this is an old post but i need to know this.

 

[eHuman]

i know this is an old post but i need to know this.

Countryboy, the original question is really misleading. Your birds may only get to 8 ounces at max size. Someone may recommend waiting until 12 ounces to cull. I try to wait until 9-11 weeks to cull to ensure that the birds put on as much weight as possible without unnecessarily feeding them.

The exception I am actually doing today, I am culling my aggressive males at 7 weeks old regardless of size. I have 23 males, 4 of which will be kept for breeders and will cull 9 or 10 today and the rest in a couple of weeks.

If you want larger and larger meat birds, breed your biggest roos to your biggest hens and hatch their eggs regardless of egg weight. Rinse and repeat.

If you want larger and larger eggs for eating then only hatch your heaviest eggs.

In both cases you are taking advantage of the genetics. A common misnomer is that bigger eggs produce bigger birds when in fact bigger birds produce bigger birds.

 

[CountryBoy47]

Countryboy, the original question is really misleading. Your birds may only get to 8 ounces at max size. Someone may recommend waiting until 12 ounces to cull. I try to wait until 9-11 weeks to cull to ensure that the birds put on as much weight as possible without unnecessarily feeding them. The exception I am actually doing today, I am culling my aggressive males at 7 weeks old regardless of size. I have 23 males, 4 of which will be kept for breeders and will cull 9 or 10 today and the rest in a couple of weeks. If you want larger and larger meat birds, breed your biggest roos to your biggest hens and hatch their eggs regardless of egg weight. Rinse and repeat. If you want larger and larger eggs for eating then only hatch your heaviest eggs. In both cases you are taking advantage of the genetics. A common misnomer is that bigger eggs produce bigger birds when in fact bigger birds produce bigger birds.

This is what I have 53 quail that I tagged and weighed this weekend they are 8 weeks old. I have 24 males and 29 females. They weight from 140grams to 272grams.

1. 140g - 199g= 22 (9 females,12 males)
2. 200g - 229g= 26 (16 females, 9 males)
3. 230g - 280g= 5 (2 females, 3 males)

My plan is too cull all that are in the first category and half or more in the second and pick only the larger males and females, and possibly do some line breeding to get to a jumbo size bird maybe something like the tatanka project and then possibly breed that to a known Jumbo bird to bring in new blood. below you will find the stats on the largest birds i have the numbers look rough weight wise but with some time this will look better.

10 largest Females 10 largest Males

1. 261g 1. 273g
2. 239g 2. 250g
3. 229g 3. 239g
4. 228g 4. 234g
5. 226g 5. 229g
6. 225g 6. 224g
7. 218g 7. 218g
8. 218g 8. 211g
9. 217g 9. 206g
10. 217g 10. 203g
Do you all think i'm on the right track?

 

[eHuman]

You are on the right track. If you breed your 2 largest males to your 10 largest females you will see improvement in the next generation.

 

[SC cityquail]

Hello Everyone.

My wife and I are new to the quail business, like only 5 weeks and 4 days ago our first batch of 22 hatched out, They are jumbo browns, from what I have read on here they are large for their age 3 of the hens were over 300 grams at 5 weeks. I will post a video on the 6 week weigh in with a scale and video.

We have 12 hens from the 22 hatched and I have them housed 3 hens 1 roo. this evening when we went to do chores there was 6 eggs in the egg trey on the front of the cage, problem is one of the hens had a prolapse and was bleeding a little, so to be humane we went ahead and dressed her out, her live wight was 285 grams 10 ounces, and she dressed out 7.7 ounces.
Is this a good dressed weight for a bird less then 6 weeks old?

Not planning to dress anymore until they reach at least 380 grams.

We had been doing a lot of research on raising quail for many months and when we went to visit our daughter a few months ago she told us her neighbor had some quail in his basement, and we
had to go ask and look. He said he had been selective breeding for 15 years, his birds were huge, he only kept a very few of the eggs that weighed over 18 grams to hatch and fed the rest to his dogs, I got 30 eggs from him, 22 hatched.

At 4 week weigh in the average weight of all 22 was 214.15 grams, the largest one tipped the scales at 254 grams.

Thank you for your time and hope we hear from anyone on the size and dressed weight of my quail

 

[Wayback]

What breed of quail are you speaking of? Are they bobwhites, coturnix...? They sound to be of good size for the age.

 

[SC cityquail]

They are jumbo browns.

 

[Wayback]

Yea, figured that out when I re-read the post. Just reaching in and grabbing a couple bag at 3 weeks 94gr. At 7 weeks 200gr. Don't have any 4weeks. So yes I would say they are larger. Send me some eggs when you get a few extra.

 

[SC cityquail]

I will let you know how the fertility rate is after they lay for a week or 2, the eggs are weighing 11 to 14 grams we got 5 this evening.

We only want 24 hens producing eggs and the other side of the room for growing pens.All our cages are wire and single layered not stacked.

Like i said earlier in the post we are very new to this quail business, and have gotten eggs from 3 sources, keeping them apart until they are mature and ready to breed.

Our last purchase hatched a week ago and we did a 7 day weigh in and the average of 27 birds was 42.59 the runt of the bunch was 25 grams the big one was 54 grams. that is the highest 7 day weigh in from all 3 batches.

I have no problem giving eggs away if you were to pay postage, needless to say we are not into this to get rich, just want to get huge birds back into the mix.

Our quail room is in our basement, kept at a constant 70 I hooked into the house central air and heat, when we are comfortable so are they.
I have a small window for fresh air and a 4 inch inline exhaust fan that cycles for 10 mins every hour, out through a dryer vent to the outside. We feed a 28% game bird feed to all our birds,
Have the light on a timer so they get 15 hours straight light 6AM to 9 PM with 30 min at 1:30AM

Dont know if this is the perfect set up but we took into account all the thousands of posting and stories on the internet.

 

[SC cityquail]

Hello Everyone.

My jumbo brown's hatched Feb 22 2017 and started getting the first eggs exactly at 5 1/2 weeks old, the first 3 days had 4 soft shell out of 18 hens. I used 28% game bird feed, upon them starting to lay I switched to a 18% oyster shell chicken laying mix. Was that a good thing to do? The soft shell eggs stopped showing up and they seem to be content and I'm getting 12 to 15 eggs out of the 18 hens each day

My 3 largest hens tip the scale a little over 12 ounces, My Roo's are still on the 28% and I weighed them tonight and they are from 260 to 280 grams, right at 10 ounces. I dressed 2 of the
roo's from the feeder pens just now and they dressed out at 7.7 ounces, that is whole not boned, 6 weeks and 5 days old

I have 6 of my largest hens ratio 3 to 1 with my largest Roo's those I keep the eggs for incubation. We are a small set up with only 65 birds at this point.I have it set up to house 100 birds total,
egg production one side, meat on the other side of the room.

We have part of our basement enclosed insulated with the central heat and air ducked into it so it is always a constant 70 degrees. Lighting is automatic 6am to 10pm then total darkness, we have a exhaust fan 4 inch ducked out to the outside that cycles every hour for 15 min.

My laying hens I dont have a Roo with, except the largest that I use for hatching.

I have gotten birds from PA, OK, and here in NE so I have different blood lines they are all jumbo browns, with some Texas A&M eggs on the way.

If anyone can give us any information to better our operation please feel free to tell us, we are new to the quail thing, our first hatch was 02/22/2017.

Thank you for your time everyone