diy egg candler

[sinclairmic]

hi everyone my chinese painted quail eggs are in the bator at the minute and are due to be candled on sunday. Please can you advise me how best to make an egg candler. i have made one in the past for chicken eggs which worked fine. i have just tried the same method for the quail eggs but it wasnt very good. ant pictures would be great thanks michael

 

[DK newbie]

Button quail eggs are supposedly very hard to candle because they are so dark. I read about someone using their smartphone flash as egg candler and have since tried it myself - but only on budgie eggs which are tiny and white. It worked great for those though. I just placed the egg on the flash, but you might want to make sure no light is visible around the egg, by placing a piece of cardboard or something with a hole for the egg on top of the flash. Not sure the flash is strong enough, but if you have the smartphone, at least it doesn't cost you anything to try

 

[sinclairmic]

thanks for the reply, i will have a go now. i think ill try a bottle top with a hole in. the chinese painted quail eggs i have arent that dark. Hopefully this idea will work. you mention budgies, do you have an aviary with the budgies in? i am building a 12ftx8ft aviary in a couple of weeks for budgies. the quails in the incuabator are going to be the first birds in once theyre fully feathered.doyou have any pictures of your budgie/quail setups? thanks

 

[DK newbie]

The breeding budgies live in a cage, but yes, I do have a small-ish aviary (about 5x7ft + an outside area of 3x6ft' (I hardly even remember the measurements in cm, so converting a measurement I don't remember to a unit I'm not used to using might lead to slightly erroneous numbers ^^) that houses both budgies and button quail. You caught me away from home, but I do have a single picture on my laptop that at least shows most of the quail-part of the aviary:


The budgies just have some branches, a small shelf for their feed and a window that leads to the outside part (the buttons sometimes stray out of the window too, usually when there are too many of them - at one point there were 19 buttons in there! - I just catch them and put them back inside when that happens), that you don't see in the picture. The buttons in the picture (3 females an one male) incubated their own eggs and hatched chicks several times last year, most of their nests were behind the spruce branches in the back.

 

[sinclairmic]

I have a brick shed that i am converting into the inside flight the actual interior flight will be 6ftx5ft leading to the 12ftx8ft outside flight. i had planned on putting a hatch in the bottom for the quail to have access to both the inside and outside like the budgies will do. however after thinking about it. i am worried a hole on the floor will increase the chance of any vermin getting to the roosting budgies inside. so now i am just putting a chicken coop into the outside flight for the quail to live in.