Quail Breeding Newbie

[JacinLarkwell]

I'm getting a group of Japanese quail in about a month. It comes with 1 male and 5 females, but I'm not planing on keeping all the females due to space issues and have no clue what any of the colors will be until they arrive.

I know chickens can be over bred if there aren't enough hens for the rooster to spread his activities out with, and was wondering if quail will do the same thing. I also know that you can make covers for hens to help protect their backs from the roosters, and was wondering if that was an option for quail.

To sum this rambling up, I was wondering these three questions:
1) How many females does a male ideally need to not overbreed
2) Can you breed different colors together and get recognized colors or will their chicks all be muddled messes
3) Will mating saddles work on Quail? Or are they too small for them to be effective?

Thanks for any help, want to make sure I'm not wandering into this blind and I'm not having much luck searching for this online elsewhere
~Jacin

 

[mdees88]

Are you keeping the quail to eat the eggs or hatch the eggs? If you're only eating them you do not need a male at all. I keep mine at 1:4 and 1:5. I'm guessing 1:3 would be the bare minimum but maybe someone else can clarify.

 

[JaeG]

I agree, 1:3 would be a minimum and if the male is aggressive he may need up to 8 hens. I've never heard of anyone making saddles for quail and their body shape is completely different to chickens, and they are a lot smaller.

Some colours are dominant, some recessive and unless you know what the birds genetics are, it's potentially a box of chocolates.

 

[DK newbie]

I'd keep all the females, at least for a while. I had a roo who had 6 females yet over bred 2 of them, causing them to loose the feathers on their neck - which is why mating saddles won't work. They might loose feathers on their back as well, but the real issue is the neck since the roo will hold on to their skin when the feathers are gone and this is likely to make the skin tear and the bird bleed - and then you are in real trouble, since quail can turn cannibalistic at the sight of blood, the entire flock could turn on the bleeding bird and it can be dead before you even know there is an issue.
So if you find your roo is mainly breeding 1-2 of the hens, you might be able to get away with selling those two and the rest will be fine and not overbred. But if you keep his favorite hen, depending on his age, the cage size and such, that could be a real problem. Younger roos tend to have more sex drive than older roos, so an old roo might be fine with just 1-2 hens.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

Okay, thanks. I was originally going to keep 3 hens per male, but that was back when I was only getting one set at first. I'll probably end up with 4 per male now that I'm getting two and selling the extra female pair off. I think the genetics are pretty solid because you can order specific colors in hatching eggs.

I'll keep the extras for a bit though since I wasn't planning to sell them off until June anyhow, thanks for the heads up about numbers