Quail Fight Club

[Hoppelchen]

I've unfortunately been sold mixed Coturnix quails of all colors (white, brown, golden) which are almost impossible to sex(I had ordered Goldens...) . I now have Goldens in the brooder, but until they are laying, I have to somehow work with the mixed guys who are not all that friendly or easy to work out!

My problems are as follow:

I had the original breeder crew as a set up of 8 hens and 2 roos. After some general mayhem and vicious fights where I lost 3 hens in week 20(no idea why all of a sudden, but...), I slaughtered the roos by mistake (what I thought was a roo with foam at the vent actually was a hen..) and so, I now have 5 hens from that cohort.

The next cohort had one nice big brown roo and I put him with 2 brown hens and (correctly sexed, yay!) 2 white hens into a seperate cage, and on day 60, the roo started to persecute the white hens with a vengeance, so I had to remove them. I had never before seperated them, and he is totally ok with the brown hens. This is btw, the
cohort that contained the famous brown 'ASBO quail' that I posted about which at day 5 started to dementedly attack any other quail chick in the brooder manically, so... it's not entirely surprising and I guess the rest of the birds will also have a tinge of that. (I should have taken a video of that critter, it was epic)

I have another cohort coming up and they already killed one roo when I separated out a 8-2 breeding crew (it was ok for 5 days, and then not), they now have settled down, I could remove the surplus hens to recombine them with another roo from the same cohort.

So right now, I have 9 laying hens, 5 old 'uns, 2 young hens (80 days) and one breeding trio (80 days) that only has one egg per day between them(I'm not impressed with that either), and selection of young roos that are 54 days old, plus a cage with one roo and 8 young hens of that same 54 day cohort.

Is there any way I can get those ladies hitched somehow, as I know that after mating they stay fertile for a few days?

thanks for any matchmaking advice,

Hoppelchen

 

[joe125]

Just select the ladies, and a roo or two. Put them in a pen together that neither calls home, then let the summer take it's course.
The spring peck-off is mostly over.

The color of the birds, doesn't really matter either. A coturnix, is a coturnix, is a coturnix!

 

[aprophet]

once breeding gets underway full blast those 2 hens in the trio will start to get tore up pretty bad you might go to 3-4 hens to 1 male 1 or 2 of my he men roos I have either 4-5 hens with when breeding season hits they have a one track mind

 

[Wifezilla]

The color of the birds, doesn't really matter either. A coturnix, is a coturnix, is a coturnix!

Not necessarily. My big brown roo Romeo will not mate with my English white Cricket. He doesn't pick on her or anything. He just will not mate with her ever. My smaller roo Zombie doesn't care. Of course the big roo wont let the little roo mate with her. Every time he hops on, Romeo rips out his feathers and really ruins his romantic moments. Last time he beat the little guy up so bad I had to take him indoors and put him in a hospital pen. Since I got a new batch of mixed birds, I just took one of the browns out of the new batch and left her with big roo and put the English white in with a new white roo. Problem solved, but Romeo obviously has a color preference.

So that leaves me with a trio of whites, a quad of browns, and 2 bachelors I can't put in the run because the big roos attack them.

I swear, it's like a freaking soap opera out there! Good thing I have a couple of extra cages!​

 

[Hoppelchen]

Quote:
I forgot, I tried that too, meant to mention it but the post go long anyway. Here is the sorry story:

After this brown roo had a peck at the white girls, I then put him in a different location into a new cage with 2 of the old hens. That looked ok for a while(I watched them for an hour), he crowed and everything seemed to be great and I thought my problems are sorted... but when I looked in the evening again bit later, they'd half scalped him but I decided not to put him down because the eye wasn't affected, and he's a big guy too. I took him out and put him back with his two brown ladies and he moped a couple of days with a massive headache and now he is crowing again and chasing the girls. I did try to add the two pecked hens back at the same time as I put him back, thinking that perhaps his attitude had been adjusted by the meanie matrons and he'd not feel like bullying, but, even tho he was beaten up and miserable, he still enthusiastically tried to peck two those in a directed, vicious way(definitely not mating attempts!), and so I removed them again and decided that on balance, I rather have infertile eggs than bloodied birds.

So, I'm a bit loathe to just mix and match again, maybe the roo was still a bit young at 70 days (in relation to the veteran hens), but well, it seems that most people can just combine them without it turning into Circus Maximus.

 

[joe125]

Well....You kinda screwed up.

When mixing and matching coturnix, you need some kind of neutral territory. (A PEN UNKNOWN TO ALL BIRDS!)
Anything else you can throw at their pea brain to confuse them is an asset! Different color feeder, water fount 75 deg. off kilter...Woo hoo!
Anything that resets their love of perpetual sameness, being shattered is good, you should get reclamation of the new "SAMENESS" they crave.

It's very logical if you don't really think about it.

 

[deerman]

one word for the pecker......BIT...........will stop any pecking