Coturnix quail bullies...

[drjohntas]

I am new to quail but my observations and thoughts are that the damage to our female quail is primarily a result of mating behaviour. We have 5 quail raised from chicks. At about 8 weeks of age the single male began mating the females and at about the same time we started to get eggs. The young male's mating method is to drive his sharp little beak into the female's skull and hold her down whilst doing the deed. For the first week or so this was a relatively benign activity with barely a feather lost. However his mating frequency and ferocity escalated over several days until he was drawing blood and a few feathers lost. Then after one overnight session I awoke to the sound of the females in distress…. flapping and leaping about in an attempt to escape our now sex-crazed adolescent male. Two hens were badly damaged, one losing an eye. All this in one evening. I turfed the male outside the mobile coop, but he persisted in spearing the females through the wire-bars. I now wrap the coop in thread bird-netting .. problems solved. The hens have healed quickly and are laying OK.
I got my quail from my son who had the same experience and reported that the damage decreased as his birds got older.
I reckon that in their natural environment the wild female would be less damaged for a variety of reasons. 1. the females could escape constant personal attention. There is a real problem in a small coop where escape is impossible. 2. the younger males might find themselves kept away by dominant older males. 3. wild quail in our area are typically in large groups giving more refuge for unhappy females.
I think the spearing of the female is probably not an act of aggression, but actually a normal part of the mating ritual. It becomes a problem in the artificial environment of an enclosed space.

 

[aviaryP]

I bought 4 quails from the local flea market. He told all of them r females but one of them the darkest one is beating on a the light colored one. What do i do?

 

[Binki]

You need to seperate the aggressor but not take it out of sight if you plan on keeping them all together in the future.

It's possible the flea market just shoved some female quail together that didn't know each other/weren't properly introduced.

Make a cage within your cage or partition a part of your cage and put the aggressor in there with food and water where all the quail can see each other.

Hopefully they will get used to each other in a few days. It will also help if you have a big space and hiding places in case all the aggressive female wants to do is chase her out of sight but she can't since there's no hiding spaces so she takes it further.

It can take up to a few weeks, quail do have different personalities lol.

 

[drjohntas]

I recently bought a dozen quail from a breeder who nicely showed me how to tell male from female by squeezing their privates.. the ones which squeezing caused a foam ejection were males, the ones with no result were females. So we carefully sexed each one and I paid for my females... 3 turned out to be males. You can never be 100% sure which sex you are getting.
On another tack .. when I got my first lot of quails I used to bring them inside the house on frosty nights and place their "inside home cage" by the heater. This group laid eggs continuously for 340 days.
My most recent group were left outside to cope with whatever winter brought them. Stopped laying altogether. I don't know if it was the result of how I cared for them or if it was that they were sourced from a different breeder.

 

[the3quail]

My males were raised together, since they hatched. The are fine, they have never been mean. Not all are mean..
They mate with the girls daily, it is NOT a mating behavior.
When they mate, they hold the girls head back and get on top of her.

 

[FloorCandy]

Sorry I didn’t see it was an old thread