Quail bedding or wire?

[catesquire]

I was eyeing that in the store and wondering why I'd never heard of someone using it! Good to know it's holding up. Is your cage indoors or outdoors? Does it seem like it would hold up to predators?

 

[Creede]

As far as wire…

I use 1/2 inch hard plastic mesh with zip ties holding it onto the frame. Not plastic coated wire, all plastic.

I’m only a little past a year into this, but so far no foot issues and the mesh is holding up fine in MN weather.

It can sag a bit with a gallon waterer, but through trial and error… that means you didn’t use enough zip ties… like every 8 inches on the mesh.

I bought my mesh at Menards in person but I’m pretty sure you could buy the same online?

The weather there gets really cold too, right?

 

[DJ_Quail]

The weather there gets really cold too, right?

My coop/cage is outside in an area sheltered by a privacy fence. And yes, it gets very cold in MN. In a winter here, it’s pretty much expected that we’ll have some days where the high temp is below zero. And some overnight lows of -20, or -25 Fahrenheit.

As far as predators… my birds are off the ground. I’ve had the cage out there for 15 months and haven’t lost any birds to predators.

But maybe I’m just lucky. If a hungry raccoon came some night, it might be agile enough to hang onto the mesh for however long it took him to chew through it. But it wouldn’t be an easy task!

 

[DJ_Quail]

I don’t underestimate a hungry predator, and what they can do!

A while back I had bobwhite quail in a cage in a suburb of Minneapolis, Fridley.

I came home to find 6 of them missing their heads and necks… and 6 full bodies inside of the cage… and many feathers at the scene of the crime.

This was a cage with the type of wire mesh with holes a little bit bigger than a quails head.

So I was picturing that something scared the hell out of them, where they panicked, trying to escape, and the ones that couldn’t get their head loose from the wire mesh… were the 6 that were dead.

I set a Havahart trap, a live trap… and put two of the quail bodies in it for bait.

The next morning I weighed the trap with the raccoon that was in it.

The trap and angry raccoon in it weighed 42 lbs. I don’t know if the trap weighed 3 lbs. or 5 or 10 lbs…. But there was a big assed raccoon in the trap!