My baby quail just died...

[Cucco]

I have a young cockerel (3 months old), a RIR chick (1w/o) and two quails (1w/o?). They are doing great so far, so I feel confident and went to buy a little baby quail. He/she was probably just some days old (it's entire body was the size of a little thumb). It was so lively in the trip home, even more than the others when they were young...

So I put him in the same brooder as the chick and quails and then I realized how much the others grew in just a week. He was tiny, I feared they were going to crush him, so I made him a little shelter with a strainer:

Little chick and white quail were really gentle with bumblebee, but brown codorniz always pecked at him at the first chance, so I though he would be safe inside...


My hand is normal size...



He is cosy inside.


Daytime temps here (central México) are about 86°f in summer, so I use just a little 5w bulb (they flee even from a 50w lamp and cried searching for shade when I put then in the morning sun, poor things)

He seemed not to eat or drink anything (I don't know if, like chicks, they don't need that much food the first days...) I should've reseached more beforeahand ¬_¬

The same night I bought him home he was trying to cuddle under Schierke (the fluffy chick) and they all had a good night.


This morning I wake up with my cockerel crows and little bumblebee cries, and was relaxed knowing he survived his first night ñ_ñ, but he seemed less active than yesterday. I put him in another brooder with the heat lamp and feed him chick/water pudding using a q-tip. He was crying and ¿"drinking"?, but still couldn't stand, and was just dragging himself far from the heat lamp. I was thinking of registering here for help, but the, suddenly, while he was drinking from the q-tip, he got an empty stare, went silent and move no more.

It was so suddenly, just two hour before he was moving and crying inside his little shelter, and now I have no idea what went wrong, or If I could have done anything to save him.
Just some minutes later, my little brother arrived from elementary school, hoping the see the little one again...

was the temp? should I've feed him yesterday when I noticed he wasn't eating? did he needed to cuddle with the others at night, instead of being alone in his little shelter? did he fell sick?...

I feel so sad, he is the first living thing that dies under my care. At least, I want to know what I did wrong, so It doesn't happen again (I really want keep on with this, along with my little bro)

 

[Advocat]

First, I am so sorry to hear about your loss -- they really grab your heart in a hurry, don't they?

I'm no expert at all at quail raising, and hopefully someone else here with a lot more experience can offer some ideas to you as to what may have happened.

But I got my baby quail when it was only a day or two old. Don't have a brooder, so I put it in a glass aquarium with a wire top (for air) and set one end of that on a heating pad set at Medium, also with a small lamp sitting close to that end of the aquarium. I read that they need to be kept at a temp of about 95 degrees both day and night -- I did this for a little over a month. If your brooder temp drops below that, it might be all right for your other chicks but maybe not for this little one.

The other thing that comes to mind is what you had for food for this little one. The best feed is Gamebird Starter because quail need more protein than chickens do. Chick crumble feed would be okay for only a short while. But the main thing is, a tiny quail can't eat the full size pieces of crumble, so for a baby quail this young the feed has to be ground fine. Some people use a coffee grinder to grind the feed, but I just put some feed on a folded paper towel and pressed down hard on it with the back of a large spoon until it crushed up fine.

Also, depending on how old this baby was, it may not yet know how to find the feed. Quail parents tap their beaks on the ground to draw a baby's attention and the baby will run and peck where the parent has pecked. We humans can tap with a finger to attract the baby quail, their instinct tells them to peck where they see "pecking" being done. Maybe any pecking by your other chicks would have been enough for the baby quail to get the idea, but I don't know.

Again, very sorry about your baby bird.