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Hello there and welcome to BYC! :frow

Quail are really fun little birds to keep. There is a TON of personality in such a tiny package! They will surprise you at their intelligence as well.

The only other breed of quail you can keep here in the US without a license is Button Quail however they are an indoor quail being a tropical bird. Being up in the Sierra's, your temps are probably too cold to keep Buttons anywhere but inside. (they can't tolerate temps much below 50 degrees and prefer 70 to 85 degrees F.)

As for incubating at high elevations, I am at 7,000 feet up here in the mountains of New Mexico. The only difference I see in incubation practices is that you need to incubate with vents wide open. There is a lot less oxygen at altitude and they will need as much oxygen as your machine can suck in. So use a model of machine that has either fixed open vents or vents you can open and close yourself.

Good luck with your Coturnix quail! Definitively stop by our Quail forums for help on all accounts and welcome to our group!! :)
 
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I can tell you from personal experience that you will have to be diligent about protecting plants from quail. I have bricks at the base of every plant in my garden/aviary and anything food related has to be caged until it's big enough to withstand them. They'll want greens so be prepared to provide them with variety.

That goes double for chickens! Good luck, see you around the boards :frow
 
TwoCrows said:
Hello there and welcome to BYC! :frow

Quail are really fun little birds to keep. There is a TON of personality in such a tiny package! They will surprise you at their intelligence as well.

The only other breed of quail you can keep here in the US without a license is Button Quail however they are an indoor quail being a tropical bird. Being up in the Sierra's, your temps are probably too cold to keep Buttons anywhere but inside. (they can't tolerate temps much below 50 degrees and prefer 70 to 85 degrees F.)

As for incubating at high elevations, I am at 7,000 feet up here in the mountains of New Mexico. The only difference I see in incubation practices is that you need to incubate with vents wide open. There is a lot less oxygen at altitude and they will need as much oxygen as your machine can suck in. So use a model of machine that has either fixed open vents or vents you can open and close yourself.

Good luck with your Coturnix quail! Definitively stop by our Quail forums for help on all accounts and welcome to our group!! :)
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Yeah I figured buttons would not work for up here! I am at 4000ft so how many vents at what size should i put in? I'm gonna build an incubator out of an old ice chest so I can do all kinds of venting/air flow....and I have more questions that I will be asking in other forums for sure :)
 
Fishkeeper said:
I gotta warn you, quail are bad for pest control. If you let them out, you'll never see them again, either because they'll leave or because something will eat them. Coturnix in particular are very vulnerable to predators because we domesticated all the sense out of them. They won't reliably come back to a coop. If you want pest control, you need guineas or chickens. Quail are great, but you have to keep them contained all the time.
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Thanks for the heads up! I was going to try to train my pup to herd them while we're outside but that is an unrealistic expectation haha.
Instead, I am planning to make a little mobile foraging tractor for them - we have hawks, eagles, raccoons, foxes, coyote, bears,and cougars here. Probably have some reptilian predators as well. Planning to dig down 18 inches for burying hardware cloth of the aviary walls and hopefully place rocks or bricks along the edges to prevent anything from digging in.
 

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