Do quail lay for more than one season?

dpenning

Crowing
8 Years
Jul 20, 2013
1,762
7,342
417
Blue Ridge, TX
i started with quail last year with some hatching eggs I bought online. They started laying prolifically at around 9 weeks. I have two breeding pens set up with one male and five or six females in each. Last year I would get almost an egg a day per female. This year they are only giving me one or two a day. Do they really only lay well for the first year?
 
They should lay well again this year. You’ll have to wait until the daylight hours get closer to 14 a day before you’ll know for sure.
 
Mine were laying at 3 years old just as well as they were when they started. I do let them have a break over winter.
 
The ones I carried into their 2nd year layed as good as they did the 1st year.
But at 18 months old I replaced them with younger birds.
 
I guess I’m only at 12 hours of daylight officially. Sunrise is 7:23 and sunset is 7:39.

My chickens are all back online with full production so I thought it would be the same timing.

Thanks for the feedback.
 
I experience the same thing. I think quail are more seasonal than chickens. My quail stop laying before the chickens and restart well after.
 
I experience the same thing. I think quail are more seasonal than chickens. My quail stop laying before the chickens and restart well after.

Makes a lot of since considering how relatively recently quail were domesticated (1500s as song birds, early 1900s breed for eggs/meat production and then the breeding stock had to be re-established after WWII) compared to chickens which were domesticated around 4-6,000 years ago. I came across an interesting article recently that explored some of the differences that have already developed between domestic and wild quail populations. One of the main differences was domestic quails' increased rate of lay and fertility rate. I imagine that length of laying season will similarly increase over the future decades/centuries.
 

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