Coturnix confusion

[gpop1]

Ducks are starting to sound not so bad after all, maybe a second chicken coop.

A few more questions while debating passing on the quail experience..

Brooding - I use a Brinsea ecoglow in place of a lamp for my chickens. Any chance quail are smart enough at all to use this or would I need to grab a lamp for them?

More on housing -

I'd really like to go with a walk-in coop/run to avoid bending, squatting, crawling - all the things that are a pain in the rear as you get older. Outside of bringing the interior coop to ground level, what else would you suggest I do on the cattle panel design? Would a small barrier wall along the bottom of each side help at all? Maybe a 6" or 8" high strip to cut off direct wind in case they don't go inside the interior box?

Roofing - I'm reading correct that the entire 16' would need some sort of roof and not just the interior coop? That's terribly inconvenient if so..

you really don't need a interior house. A covered hoop coup would work just fine. If you have predators then a low wall all the way around would be a good idea so the quail can not be chased from the outside of the coup. If you add some plants then you will have happy quail.

As for brooding you have to make sure the food and water is under a light or they might just stay in the warm and stave to death. Im not sure what a ecoglow is but im sure you can make it work by getting the food and water close enough.

A simple brooding tip is happy quail are quiet unhappy are constantly crying.

 

[0wen]

As for brooding you have to make sure the food and water is under a light or they might just stay in the warm and stave to death.

Wow... They keep getting smarter

...
Looks like a 2nd chicken coop for me. Thanks for the information everyone.

 

[0wen]

Looking back on this. I butchered off all of my quail at the end of November but found them relatively easy to keep. I kept around 40 at a time in the hoop coop, would go through times of culling for the freezer and restocking and such.

They're much easier to integrate new birds into a flock as opposed to chickens. Example being if I took 20 of the 40 birds for the freezer and then introduced new chicks (once brooded to age for outdoors), I'd just keep them separated within the larger structure for a few days, maybe a week (I had a 4x4 raised bed with a hinged lid once used for srawberries and to keep birds out of them) and then combine the groups. Never a peck or tuss, they just joined like they were always together.

The high protein diet creates terrible smelling poop. They seems to forage and dig similar to chickens, but maybe not as well so that's likely a factor, but I also made a point to rake the coop a couple of times a week. Never any build up or such, but definitely a noticeable difference in the chicken coop and the quail coop.

They make a mess of their food more so than the chickens. I eventually hung their food a bit off the ground but they still weren't great. Wasteful for sure.

Great layers and they were good farmers market items. Partly because of the novelty I'm sure but they always produced more than enough to sell at market. The pain of having to have different (more expensive) cartons wasn't great. Quality quail egg cartons are difficult to find. A lot of difference between similar looking cartons. I hated that most were plastic. Harvesting eggs was a pain, and one of the reasons I wasn't sorry to see them go to the freezer. It just takes one quail to spook when you're walking around the run collecting to send a lot of birds into a panicked frenzy of flying into you and such - irritating! That being said, I considered adding more this spring, but my wife and kids want to try ducks, so here we go with that...