Our Quail Journey 2021/22

[BrandonsBirbs]

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Incubating with a cheap Chinese incubator (Janoel12/MagicFly)​

Male Crowing Overnight - Problem and Solution!​

Baby's Batch - First Hatch-a-long​

Current Hatch-a-long​

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The full journey so far!​

Aqqressive - A gory story about a mean roo​

 

[BrandonsBirbs]

Brandon's Quail Journey

Our initial quail journey began before 2021, when we kept a few quail purely as pets. Over time we realised that maybe we would like to have a few more and even try learning more about them. Our pet quails passed away at the start of 2021, naturally, so we decided it was our time to try and hatch our own.

We bought a small incubator from Amazon, a Janoel12, and some hatching eggs from the crazy lady who initially gave us our quails we had as pets. We set up the 8 eggs and our adventure began! Going into lockdown we only ended up with 7 fertile eggs, 6 hatched and 1 had quit. We thought it was pretty good going for our first time!

Once they were old enough to go outside, we set our quail up in an XXL rabbit cage with local soil, some plants and a little hidey spot. Not too long after they moved, one of them passed away, to this day we still do not know why.

Our journey continued as I pampered the quails as much as I could and tried my best to tame them. I was successful with two of the girls and the only male. The other two females with the Japanese colouring just always seemed to hate humans lol. The grey one is Brianna (my favourite), the white one with a brown head was Bill and the other white one is Birdie.

Now Birdie really got me interested in quail because we had SO many problems with her so I was always trying to find information on what could be wrong and how it could be remedied. No matter what she went through she was always happy though (and still is!).

After all her issues, when she finally felt better, Bill decided he no longer liked her (she was in a separate cage inside so maybe he forgot about her). I came home one day to a very bloody Birdie and a very angry Bill. This was when I first learned quail can be NASTY!

Soon after we had to keep Birdie separate and then had to remove Brianna as the "Japanese twins" decided to start bullying her. This led to months of moving birds around, trying different techniques to get them to be nice and resulted in having to keep Birdie separate to everyone else, Brianna with Bill and the twins together!

 

[BrandonsBirbs]

Over the following months we incubated a few more eggs, tried to have different setups and different amounts of birds but at the end of that time period we ended up sending our birds to others and just keeping our original five (mainly due to sentimentality).

Fast forwarding to the beginning of 2022, we decided to incubate just 12 eggs that we had sourced from the original crazy lady instead of shipped eBay eggs. 8 babies hatched from these 12 and were what inspired us to want to be able to breed our own.

We really wanted to keep them but based on our current (at the time) setup we didn't feel that they would thrive like they deserved so we found them a lovely place to stay.

I got to work building a lot of cages and trialling different ideas and plans I'd found, some cages for meat birds and some extra-roomy ones for our egg layers. We then set about ordering over 64 eggs!

 

[BrandonsBirbs]

We managed to do pretty well hatching them out considering they were shipped eggs, we found 76 out of 84 to be fertile, and managed to take 66 into lockdown. 60 hatched! Never had such good luck with shipped eggs so we really didn't plan for quite so many, but we managed to cope well with them and had some people interested in taking quite a few off our hands ASAP.

During this brooding process we were trying fermented feed as I had read a few articles suggesting it was the superior way to go. The first few days seemed amazing, but around days 5-7 we lost a number of quail. After taking a few to a local vet they told us that the fermented feed was the reason they'd died. We never actually found out if it was something in the feed or the fact it's a wet feed was the issue. But suffice to say we only use dry food with our chicks now.

We ended up not keeping any of these quails as so many had been lost and we had promised a lot to the people who wanted to look after some. So we decided we'll get some new ones for ourselves. From our next lot we hatched 27/32 eggs (amazing for shipped eggs again). Excluding the ones we have culled due to poor behaviour or for food, these are the quail we have today.

We also culled Bill and the twins previous to this, Bill almost killed Brianna after being best buddies with her for a year. And the twins refused to integrate with any birds we offered them and it was just not manageable forever.

 

[BrandonsBirbs]

We have done a few more hatches since then, both from Brianna's eggs with Bill and had decent rates. We gave most of them away but we ended up with two girls no one wanted, one was a week older than the other and actually acted as her mother-figure by teaching her how to feed etcetera. Honestly the cutest thing I've ever seen.

Currently we have three cages of birds:
Left - Brianna, Birdie, Trex, Mother Hen and Little Bill. Trex is the only male in this cage. We also have now added a female from the middle cage as she was attacked by the male in that cage.
Middle - now four unnamed females. Was 5 females and a male but one female was transferred and the male had to be culled due to attempting to kill three of the unnamed females. I am not sure they will survive, the injuries are awful and happened within 4 hours.
Right - five unnamed females and one unnamed male. Very happy cage with an absolute gentleman!

We are currently testing our fertility and attempting to see if we can hatch any new babies!

(Trex)

 

[BrandonsBirbs]

Aqqressive (5th June - 7th June 2022)
This is a bit of a gory story, I will not be sharing photos as I didn't want to disrupt the ladies affected, however my descriptions of the injuries will be graphic.

Previously, in our middle cage we were keeping our standard ratio of one male to five females, these birds were all from the same hatch but different parents. The only issue we had, had with this cage so far was that the male was quite loud BUT I managed to solve that issue.

I woke up at 7am on Sunday, checked the lights had just turned on for the quails and proceeded to make my morning coffee. Once made I headed outside and cut some leaves off our corguette plants (2 leaves per group). I opened the doors to the quail shed and watched the quail do their morning popcorning.

The girls in our middle and right-hand cage, have become more tame as they get older. I am not sure why as I do not treat them any differently to the others and very rarely pick them up. But anyhow, when I feed them leaves (every few days) they come to the front of the cage and let me stroke their bellies - some of them LOVE it!

However this particular morning one of the girls, who usually is the first to want a belly tickle, was hiding at the back of the cage and not joining the others in eating. I thought she could be sleeping so I tried to not think much about it, once the tickles were done I proceeded to collecting the mornings eggs! We got 8 eggs from our combined 14 hens, not a bad morning!

Spoiler: See more

Once I had taken the eggs I decided to just double check on the hen who was hiding (had a feeling). She was looking in the other direction and I could see her face looked weird, took her out and inspected her. One of the quail had pecked her face, bad, I'm still not sure if her eye is even there. Bare in mind this most likely took place from around 8-10pm as they usually sleep from 10pm-7am. It is crazy how fast quail turn.

I cleaned her up and put her in her own cage with vitamins and extra food supplements. I didn't know who the culprit was for sure so I decided to leave it and wait until I got home to see if anything else had happened, I didn't want to upset them all without knowing who it was.

I came home and they were all fine! However, the next day when I got home from work I saw something I just couldn't believe. Since the quail seemed fine I decided to leave them there, I inspected them all and every quail was untouched and unharmed. The next morning, they were all still fine. At around 3pm, my other half checked on them and they were unharmed and all seemed happy.

When I got home at 6pm, I found blood everywhere. Four females and one male remained in the cage and all were alive. The first female who came to greet me had her feathers in a weird position so I took her out and inspected her. She was covered in blood, her skin had been broken across her chest and the wound was easily 2 inches long. She looked weak and her eyes were barely open. Surprisingly she went to eat and drink perfectly fine but you could see she was in pain. I patched her up and kept her in a small cage next to the other injured female.

I thought that was it and decided the male was the most likely culprit so he needs to be taken out too. He was removed. I fed all the quail and they came to the front of the cage. That's when I spotted another one of the girls, her neck was gashed open with blood all down her feathers. She seemed unaffected but it was a much deeper cut than the last and looked awful. I repeated the same thing with her, separated her and treated her.

Two girls remained, I took one out and she was perfectly fine and happy. When I grabbed the second I knew something was wrong, the back of her head was open. Thankfully this wound is mostly superficial and much smaller. Was very easy to treat and she was still super happy. The girls are now all in separate cages next to each other and seem okay.

The male was culled, I have experienced behaviours like this before and from my experience they almost never get better. I refuse to keep a quail who is happy to attempt to butcher his friends.

As of the morning of 8th June, all females are cheerful, all cuts have dried over and do not look too bad so I am hopeful they will be able to recover well. The first female still hasn't opened her eye so I'm not even sure if she still has one, however Brianna went through a similar attack before and took a few weeks before she would open her eye again. For now I will just nurture them and hopefully we see nothing but improvements.

I understand this isn't a nice story but I think it shows the reality of what quail will do. These quail were raised together and never separated, he had five girls to mate and still refused to be happy. I love my quails greatly and it's hard to have to deal with something like this, it makes me feel both responsible and guilty. I do not believe anything special caused this, he was already fully mature and just decided he wanted to show them who's boss. The other two males never got on with him and I do wonder if they could sense something was off.

 

[Lor]

Are you sure they weren't attacked by something else?

 

[BrandonsBirbs]

Are you sure they weren't attacked by something else?

Yes, 100%. The shed that they're in stays shut and was not damaged. If something got in the shed it wouldn't get through the fine mesh of their cage neither. No, unfortunately they can just be mean

 

[Lor]

Yes, 100%. The shed that they're in stays shut and was not damaged. If something got in the shed it wouldn't get through the fine mesh of their cage neither. No, unfortunately they can just be mean

I don't know much about quail but was thinking of looking into their care in case we decided to try our hand at raising them. I didn't know they were so mean.

 

[BrandonsBirbs]

I don't know much about quail but was thinking of looking into their care in case we decided to try our hand at raising them. I didn't know they were so mean.

For the most part they are awesome, I love having them. This is the third or fourth attack like this I've seen though so far, though the others never got to this extreme as I had caught the male red-handed. I don't know why they're so mean sometimes, but mostly they're lovely!