Long-time lurker; suddenly incubating a single quail!

[Fuchsia]

Hello
Welcome to BYC! I'm glad you joined us!

 

[swampfox440]

Welcome to BYC ! so glad you joined .

 

[CluckerFamily]

Welcome to BYC!!

 

[Texasclucker]

 

[chickentrains]

Hi! Welcome to BYC! I hope you love it here!

 

[chrissynemetz]

Hi and welcome to BYC!
Good luck with your hatch!

 

[Bumperchicken]

Just a small update -- our quail pipped late last night! Taking it easy over the evening. We're not getting our hopes up too high or anything but we're thinking he may come out today sometime if all goes well.

 

[janiedoe]

Just a small update -- our quail pipped late last night! Taking it easy over the evening. We're not getting our hopes up too high or anything but we're thinking he may come out today sometime if all goes well.

How exciting! Good luck to you and to your little quail!

 

[Bumperchicken]

Just a small update -- the chick did REALLY well right up until the day of hatch. Looking through as much info as I can, I THINK the humidity was too high and she might have drowned right at hatch time although it's hard for me to say for sure since I'm inexperienced with bird eggs. I found out later that the air cell was probably too small all the way through, and the humidity was consistently too high. I'm very much used to reptile eggs so I was erring on the side of high rather than low (which of course I found out later that quail tend to do better on the low end). But, it was very interesting that she made it that far. The temps never went too high, but went very low almost every night in our makeshift unplanned overheating-laptop incubator, so I was concerned it wouldn't make it because it was too low too often, but that really didn't seem to affect anything other than the hatch date being a few days behind. The chick was very vigorous right up to pipping, and then slowly went downhill. Never zipped.

For interest's sake, the highest it ever got was 38.8*C, and it was mostly right around 37.5*c (from a lot of vigilance!) during the day, but it would drop as low as 28 at night.

We would have liked to have helped her hatch out and have a full quail life, but since we found the egg on the road, at least she got 26 days of a tiny life with the best we could do for now. (I think my daughter's heart broke when I said that to her but it's probably healthy for her to learn to deal with these things early.)

I now have a humidity gauge and a properly thermoregulated better makeshift incubator and so we're hoping to try and do our best with the knowledge we have now; see if we can do things a little better. I'll try and post some pics in the quail section of our setup and hopefully we'll have some coturnix hatch out in a few weeks!

We have been building a run in the back so I'll share that up too when we're done.

As a side note, almost all the information that has been extremely helpful from online searches has led me back to this site!