My Covey is Finally Mature!

[OneLostHen]

I am please to announce, I found my first egg yesterday!! It's so cute!

I need to separate my men from women and decide which men I'll keep. It's going to be tough because I have 3 men I really like! And there is no way I can keep 3...
First man I love is named Fire. I think he is too cool looking!

My next man is little Cotton. He has NO spots! I have a soft spot for him because he was a runt, I didn't think he would make it at one point in time. I know it's not desirable to keep and breed runts, but I love him!

I have browns and goldens, so I need a brown man. He is one of my biggest and most handsome.

Choices..... Choices.....

Here are some of my women, just because they are cute.

Little one taking a nap in the cardboard mansion.

Thanks for looking!!
I've really been enjoying my quail. They are so much fun to watch hop around and scoot backwards. And boy do they love to dirt bathe!!

This site has been great and I would not have gotten quail if it weren't for the massive amount of knowledge available from here!

 

[Chickety Charcoal]

They look great! I am incubating eggs now, and hope to be sorting out mature quail in a few weeks. How many did you hatch and how did you keep track of them as they matured? As in the runt, did you mark him in some way. I don't know how many I will get from the 52 eggs in my incubator but I assume they will be hard to identify from each other.

 

[OneLostHen]

Mine were fairly easy to tell apart from my assortment of colors. Although it was very obvious to tell who my runt was because he was always half the size of everyone else. He feathered at the same rate, but was much smaller.
I only had 19 though, so a lot less than your future babies!
I bought these as day olds. I hope to incubate my own soon, but I still have more research to do before I try.

 

[Chickety Charcoal]

I got 8 birds out of my incubation. Not a good ratio, but enough for me to start with and learn from. They are coming up on 4 weeks old now and I need to build them an outdoor cage this weekend. They are getting to big, flighty and smelly for their indoor brooder!

 

[OneLostHen]

They will love it outside! Mine do!
I've never seen any creature that loves to dirt bathe quite like quail. I have to fill up their dirt box every few days because they soak it all up then FLUFF!! All the dirt drifts in the wind...

 

[Chickety Charcoal]

haha! Sounds great. I am looking forward to setting them up out there. I am thinking of using the 'deep litter' method.