Coturnix Quail

BackYardQuail

Songster
9 Years
Apr 12, 2014
135
7
134
How big do coturnix quail really get? Some pictures of one in your hand would be helpful... Are jumbo corutnix a bit bigger? Do jumbo coturnix breed? (I have heard they are all infertile, but i don't know how true that is) I want to know this because I want to know if it is even worth raising them for meat and eggs instead of just eggs. I am new to quails so please forgive me for all the questions I ask. Thanks!
 
The difference between normal and "jumbo" is nearly twice as much in weight and meat. The eggs will be bigger too from a jumbo compared to a regular coturnix.

Be careful when buying birds to ask the people you buy them from how much their average adults weigh in at. There's a bit of confusion about what "jumbo" is considered. My first batch of quail were "jumbo" when I bought them from a guy off craigslist. But they are tiny! My hen weighs at most 7 ounces on a good day. Meanwhile, my actual Jumbo quail are 11 ounces.

Here's a picture of the egg size difference:




It was hard to wrestle the birds and there was no way they'd stand next to each other for any reasonable amount of time, so I've compared them to a chopstick (lol)




Also, I've never heard of jumbos being infertile. Would seem odd since the only way to get jumbos, is to breed them with other jumbos. Far as raising them for meat and eggs? Totally do it. They taste amazing. Granted the largest quail is going to be much smaller than your average chicken. But two deboned quail is enough for one person, easy. Mine lay eggs without fail every day and with just five birds, I have eggs coming out of my ears. I can't keep up!

Breeding them is a cinch and totally worth the investment in an incubator. They are cheap to raise too. A 50 lbs bag of feed lasted longer than it took to raise 30 birds from egg to table.
 
For what I have grown; white, golden, tuxedo and chocolate are 5-8 oz. A&M are 8-10 oz. Jumbo are 15-18 oz.. When you incubate the jumbos you just set the large eggs. Small eggs produce small chicks. I only use 16-18 oz birds for breeding stock. I was lucky and got the full sized ones because they weren't very common several years ago. Jumbos can mean anything these days since folks are raising them themselves usually allow the small ones to breed with the big ones getting a mid sized breed. That's pretty sad since it took hundreds of years of selective breeding to get the jumbos and folks ruin it in a matter of 2 or 3 generations of raising them. Fertility is no problem by the way. I bet what you are thinking of is they lose fertility with age. They should be rotated out before a year old. I like to have a new hatch of breeders for late fall. Keep them over winter not producing. Let them start in spring naturally. Hatch replacement breeders, when established get rid of the ones I overwintered.
 

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