Fish Food for Quail

[Omniskies]

Now that the new babies are here, I need to feed them (obviously). I have a bag of gamebird starter at 28% that they will be getting. What frustrates me about the feed is that the company is firmly convinced that baby quail have a baby-pigeon sized mouth that can gobble down large chunks. So inevitably for the first few days I grind up the feed into something a little easier for tiny mouths.

This year I'm raising fish and bought a bunch of fish food, including food for the fry and fingerlings until they are large enough to eat real pellets. I was eyeing the fry food and it's practically a powder. The ingredients are pretty basic - fish meal, bone meal, corn meal, and so forth.

However, it has a 50% protein and 16% fat. My question is, how much protein is too much? Provided this is just a "jump start" feed, would it be fine? It seems as if it would be roughly the equivalent of feeding mostly insects.

I'm wondering if the immediate protein will help them grow faster without causing health problems, as will happen in waterfowl.

On that note: freeze dried insects: fine or not worth it?

 

[silkydragon]

i am curiass about this too so heres a bump

 

[Robo]

That feed has way too much fat. It has a lot of protein too, I wouldn't feed it because your birds will put on too much fat. It also is for fish so it probably doesn't have enough calicum or vitamins.

 

[Sumatra503]

Excluding the fact that it's fish food please.

 

[JJMR794]

Quote:
THAT MUCH PROTIEN WILL CAUSE RENAL FAILURE IN YOUR BIRDS, THE FAT ISSUE HAS ALREADY BEEN COVERED. PERSONALLY I DONT GRIND CRUMBLE STARTER UNLESS YOUR FEEDING BUTTONS ITS UN-NECESSARY

 

[Omniskies]

Considering the gamebird fat, that seemed awfully high to me.

Mealworms have a 58% protein - red worms have an 82-84% protein. At those levels I didn't think a 50% would hurt them for a day or two. But Lord knows I spend more of my time being wrong than being right: hence all of the questions

For anyone who supplements with mealworms and red worms (as I was planning on doing to cut feed costs once my red worms picked up), how do you know when you're feeding too many worms? Or, more to the point, how do you know when you're feeding too much protein?

 

[user66647]

Hmmm fish food for quail let me think...... I think not! fish food is for FISH.

With that being said, your question is logical, however, I would strongly warn you not to use fish food for gamebirds.

Do you have a feed store near you that sells gamebird feed?

 

[Sumatra503]

It was a simple question of protein and fat which I believe was answered already.

 

[JJMR794]

Quote:
feather curling is a late sign. STRESS LATE SIGN. POSSIBLY TOO LATE?

 

[Hoppelchen]

Quote:
As long as you keep the proportions of carbs, proteins and fat the same, the calorific value will always be very close, no matter what you combine. So as long as you're confident that the foodstuffs themselves contain the vits and other supplements the birds need and don't harm the animal, you can mix and match as you like. Just remember that the last 7 days of feeding will influence the taste of the carcass -- if you feed fish meal, chances are, your meat will tasty fishy.

If you want to combine feeds for what ever reason, then the spreadsheet is your friend. For example, I mistakenly bought chick crumbs that have 17% protein. I cannot afford to throw it away, and so, I am going to mix that with the turkey starter that has 26% once the quails drop to needing 22% protein like so:

kg of feed 10 13 23
Protein % 17 26 22.08
kg of protein 1.7 3.38 5.08

The bold values are what I change to get my target protein % that is in italics.

Here are the formula cells, you can just paste that into the top left corner of a spreadsheet and play:

kg of feed 10 13 =B1+C1
Protein % 17 26 =D3/(D1/100)
kg of protein =B2*B1/100 =C2*C1/100 =B3+C3

Now if you want to adjust the fat, up is easy, down is harder because you'd need to add carbs to dilute which will dilute the proteins but it's not as hard as it looks, it's in essence the same calculation as above.

If you want to add meal worms, it's in essence the same calculation -- suppose your birds eat 25gm of 22% protein feed, that is 0.22gms *25 = 5.5gm protein per day. If you now add 1 mealworm that weighs (say).2gm and (say) it has 50% protein and 25% fat you add 0.1gm protein and 0.05gm fat to your bird's diet.

A Paracelsus says, the dosage is the important bit, so, a few extra worms as a treat is fine, but 10 worms would up your birds intake of protein by 20% and so, you'd need to readjust their diet if you wanted to feed worms as a staple.