My family will embark on our first poultry exhibition adventure this weekend, long have we been anticipating this moment (we hatched our first eggs, from some random eBay seller in March 2024, as you can see we have invested heavily in our hereditary show stock). I will also qualify that we live in a very rural and very sparsely populated area and this is a county fair, 4-H division and we are showing quail, and we are stuck in the hobby division because even the state level doesn’t have a quail division save in open class. And to make matters worse, I literally read on the state poultry showmanship page that if your chicken is disqualified in the breed category for whatever reason, hobby is still open. I once joked about letting my daughter (a cloverbud) take Humphrey, our blind in one eye with a slight wry neck because she hatched backwards mutant, apparently she could! I asked our local folks if they could help me get started, knowing we’d need NPIP testing done, but as they knew nothing of quail and being a little intimidated thereby, I ended up contacting the state and going through that whole process, so we are legal to show, but which birds? As it turns out we are down to just the chicks I hatched in the last 3 months as most of my breeding flock has bald rumps due to an ornery hen! Not wanting to get into an altercation with the fair vet over the possibility of mites (I still have issues with the plant judge from my own 4-H days who was convinced my slightly fuzzy cactus had mealy bugs, it didn’t that was just how it looked!) or to try showing inverse turkens, we’re down to the chicks, I need two males and two females, which was fine until they all decided to be female in the older group save one male. So now I have three nine week old birds (a decent age for quail) and one 5 week old bird that is a complete spaz, gorgeous boy but very high strung no matter how much he’s handled! The older male even let us bathe him without freaking out, but this guy reminds you why some people think all gamebirds are nuts! At least we have a better selection than my open class flowers, I have one dill plant that just might have enough sprigs on it to enter, but I just discovered a young bunny who’s been eating all my plants and I couldn’t figure out why nothing was growing! But the show must go on, despite bunnies and butt peckers, even if the potential candidates are rather sparse, at least we aren’t showing beef steers! At least in 4h it is all about learning and we’ve learned a lot, what not to do! So that’s how you select a winning show bird: it isn’t bald!
