Leg Banding Quail?

[Sammbalina]

Does anyone here bother to band their quail and for what reasons? I was considering doing this, mostly because my mom wants to be able to easily identify male from female, and we are incubating Jumbo browns and jumbo A&Ms, so I know the A&Ms are not able to be sexed by color. What I was thinking was have one color for the boys and another for the girls, but what other purposes would you band them for? Also, what size is needed for jumbo quail?

 

[Derrin]

I have jumbo A&M and jumbo Brown. I ordered regular quail left bands from wynola ranch. 80% of them have slipped off. I vent sex mine at seven weeks and out all my extra makes in a cage to be culled. I now clip the bands on the cages and keep a record. I record age, make to female ratio, egg production by cage, ect.

 

[Erkenstein]

You can use different colored bands to keep track of different generations if they are mixed. I don't bother but have several cages and track which birds are in which cage on a spreadsheet.

It's pretty easy to vent sex for fixing the ratios. If you just want to know whether you are looking at a male or a female like your mom, that's not always easy at a glance, but the males do have a swollen vent a lot of times and of course they crow and mate the females. If you only have one male in with a few females, the one with no feathers missing on the neck/head is usually the male!

 

[JoeQ]

I use small wire ties to mark the males, leave them a bit loos and snip the excess off, cheap and easy!

 

[JDB99]

The smallest colored zip ties you can find. Use fingernail clippers to remove.

 

[igorsMistress]

I'm going to band the birds I decide to keep and leave the culls without them. We are waiting another 2 to 4 weeks before trying to vent sex what we can't feather sex. We're only keeping 7 total so it shouldn't get too complicated. The next generation will get a new color so we can tell them apart.

 

[CapricornFarm]

I use zip ties, white for hens and black for roos.