Crooked Beak?

[Kenekeo]

Hi all,
New to quails and to the forum. We recently got quails and incubated their eggs. For our first time, we started with 9 eggs, 8 hatched, but only 5 survived. Our first hatched chick is a Tibetan. His egg was one of the smaller, but he is now the largest (I think because he was a born 8 hours+ ahead of the others). He was bored on the morning of day 17.

I didnt noticed any deformity on him at first. How, he is now 3 weeks old and I just noticed a crooked beak on him. Could he have been born with it? Or can this be a deficient? Since they were born, I feed them gamebird feed with 30% protein. I also added some kale and snap peas. And yesterday, I gave them their first dried mealworms.

Thank you in advance.

-Kenekeo

 

[peterlund]

Sometimes a crooked beak is hereditary, sometimes from an injury. You could post up a photo. Maybe the gurus here can pinpoint the cause. Hard to treat in my experience.
Welcome to the BYC

 

[DanielleInUro]

If he's eating all right and made it to seventeen days before you saw it, I'd shrug it off. When you say crooked, do you mean it isn't lined up completely flush and kind of slightly points in two different directions? They call that cross beak or scissor beak, and it's hereditary. Just don't breed off him and make sure he's eating enough. But I'm only in my second month of quail keeping, someone with more experience will chime in--they trump me.

 

[Kenekeo]

Thank you for your reply.
I'll try to post a picture. However, I think DanielleInUro is right, its the scissor beak. He (since he has tried to coo) is eating fine. We just didn't want to cull him since he was our first chick to hatch. It will be a hard discussion with the family to explain its hereditary and that cull will be best to prevent further flock issues.

 

[DanielleInUro]

I guess it depends on what you want them for. If you're planning to eat or breed them, and he's not uncomfortable, you could always wait until just before you have the talk with the quail about how baby quail are made (or til they all google it themselves)--a funny looking bird tastes just as good as a pretty one. If it's just eggs and pets, then he's no harm hanging out being all weird looking like he owns the place