The quail are back!

A few years ago we had a pen of coturnix quail. We eventually decided to sell our little flock. We couldn't find a market for the eggs and couldn't seem to raise enough to make the meat worth it. Since then, both Big Onion and I have talked about missing those little buggers and their funny little noises and cute little eggs. Plus we cannot seem to keep up the with demand for pet food or eggs these days. We decided maybe it was time to give the little birds another go.

I had been on the lookout for anyone nearby selling some of the birds so when an ad popped up on one of the local poultry sale pages on facebook selling Texas A&M jumbo quail I decided it was time. The jumbo quail are said to lay just as many eggs as the regular coturnix, but these guys were specifically bred for meat so they grow to be much bigger and meatier than their natural cousins. They were just over an hour away so I jumped on the opportunity! The gentleman was selling what was left of his breeding flock of 22 birds, and he would throw in all their eggs from the last week as lagniappe! I was sold!

We loaded up the car with a couple medium sized dog crates one Saturday afternoon and made the drive in the sprinkling rain to pick up our newest additions. When we arrived, all 22 birds were being kept in a relatively small raised cage in the man's backyard. This is a very common way to raise quail, so I do not fault the owner of the birds, but I was happy to take the little guys home knowing much nicer digs awaited their arrival.

Once we got home, we unloaded the little birds into their new home. It is the same pen we kept in the quail in before, an indoor/outdoor on the ground enclosure that is probably 6' by 12'. Practically the Taj Mahal by quail standards!

With their feet on the ground probably for the first time in their lives, the quail started immediately exploring their new world. They were scratching and pecking and taking dirt baths right away!

 It's always amazing to see those instincts come out in animals who have probably known nothing but metal wire under their feet. It wasn't long before we started hearing their silly little quail calls and finding the tiny mottled brown eggs squirreled away all around the pen. It's a bit like Easter every day in there trying to find all the eggs since they are so well camouflaged, and the quail love nothing more than to bury their eggs under the hay and dirt.

Our plan is to primarily raise the birds for meat. All of their eggs are going into the incubator so that we can always have a good supply growing out. They are called jumbo quail for a reason, and they certainly live up their name. They are built like softballs with big, round chests and very docile temperaments commonly seen in meat birds. I know our pet food customers' kitties will be thrilled with the new product once we get that first batch of eggs hatched and grown out. Until then we are happy to have the funny little beasts back on the farm.

Our Shetland Hounddog

  One morning last week Luna and I were headed out to start our morning chores like we always do. It was very early, the sun was barely out, and the pasture grass was still wet with dew. One of Luna's normal jobs is to 'protect' us from the bottle lambs. Without Luna out there, those 7 lambs (who are about 65lbs these days) will do their best to crawl directly up our rear ends while we are trying to work. I sent Luna on ahead down the path to clear out the lambs so I could start letting out the poultry for the day. 


  She had just taken off at a good clip when her nose swung up in the air and she slid to a sudden halt. She looked back at me, asking if she should proceed with the previous command or investigate whatever scent she'd picked up. I told her go ahead and find whatever had caught her attention. After a year and a half of living and working the farm with her I've learned to listen when that dog has something to tell me. 

  Luna seemed to triangulate the scent, raising her head to pick it up off the wind then dropping her head down and working back and forth in an smaller and smaller area. She overshot, then backtracked and within a couple minutes she had honed in on her quarry and flushed a tiny bird out of a tall tuft of grass in the pasture. A softball sized blur burst straight up out of the grass and winged itself away from us with surprising speed. It took me a minute to realize that one of our quail was currently flying across the pasture away from me! 

  I called Luna back and we slowly approached the place where the little bird had landed. Quail aren't exactly the most skilled flyers. They kind of pop up into the air then drunkenly hurl themselves in one direction until gravity or a solid object ends their progress. Luna and carefully approached the loose quail and he made progressively feebler attempts to evade us. Eventually, Luna was able to herd the little guy toward me and I scooped him up out of the grass.  

  It was obvious the poor thing had been out a while. He was cold, weak, and bedraggled. When I brought him back to the pen, he immediately started chowing down on feed and gulping water.

  I'm still amazed that Luna picked up that scent; knew it was out of place in a field that is normally filled with foraging poultry and then helped me herd the little guy back where he belonged. Thanks again, Luna!

Quail processing day

Life in the quail pen has been pretty sweet. The girls just love hanging out and laying eggs under the tufts of grass that I planted in their pen in the spring. 

Unfortunately, we haven't found much of a market for their eggs so aside from the occasional batch of scotch quail eggs and the dogs and cats getting a whole egg, shell and all, tossed into their dinner bowls, we don't have a lot to do with all those eggs. So we have been incubating large batches of quail and growing them out for meat. 

 The pen, although spacious  was getting a little crowded so his weekend we decided to process a batch of our quail. We pulled out the handy kitchen scale and a plastic container. Since we do raise the little birds for meat, it's important for us to select the biggest bird to continue breeding. The easiest way to do this is by weight so we rounded all the quail into small dog crates separated by sex.
  Quail are actually very easy to sex once you know what to look for. The males have much plainer looking chest feathers, while the females tend to have more speckled chests. You can also turn them over and look for the pink, swollen gland on the adult males below the vent that produces a white foamy substance when pressed.

  Once we had them all rounded up and sexed, we popped them into the plastic container and onto the scale. The container is necessary because we just cannot seem to convince those quail to stand still for weighing! Almost all of the female save a few of the smallest are released back into the pen. We decided to keep about one male for every five females, so that left us with a good number of birds to bring up to the shed for processing. First, we let the quail spend the night in a pen in the poultry house with just water to clear their innards of food.

 I won't get into too many of the gory details here, but suffice to say that a good sharp pair of kitchen shears makes for a very quick end to the little birds.

 We did make a really convenient discovery this time while processing. One of the things that took the longest was the fact that we didn't have a cone to put the little birds in while the bled out and did their "chicken with its head cut off" thing. We would have to sit there and hold each bird until movement stopped which can sometimes take up to a minute with the quail. I happened to grab this cardboard pill bottle spacer and it was the perfect size to hold the birds to that we could move on to the next one while this held the bodies still in the sink. Brilliant. (Bonus cat butt in the above pic)

 Next step was skinning. The wings and feet are cut off first. This video describes skinning the bird as being like taking off a coat, you work it down from the top, off the shoulders and wings, then down the body. For some reason thinking of it this way made the process go a lot fast and smoother than normal.

 Due to some rather arbitrary local laws, we cannot sell quail for meat (they are considered game birds, not poultry). Instead, we run the whole ungutted birds through the meat grinder and package them to be sold as raw pet food. Cat especially seem to love the quail and grinding the whole birds like we do means they are getting a vitamin packed, tasty meal as well.

A bird in the hand and a bulldog in the backyard

This morning as I was doing chores I kept hearing Barley, our bulldog mix, barking. Barley almost never barks unless there is something to bark about, and the shelties (for once) weren't barking with him. After 3 or 4 single loud WOOFs from hin, I decided to stop cleaning out bunny pens and investigate.

Barley was standing at the backyard fence line furiously staring down at a clump of tall grass just on the other side of the fence. I figured he'd found a nest of mice and was just about to double back and collect Hunter, our barn cat, to take care of it when I saw a little red tuft of feathers just barely peeking out from under the grass.

Turns out Barley is not just a good snake hunter and rabbit watcher, we can now add quail detector to his list of accomplishments. It seems this little girl somehow escaped the quail pen and was just looking for a place to hide when a bulldog started barking in her face. I tucked her back into the enclosure, and she immediately went for the feeder to get herself some breakfast.

He may not be a herder, but I guess Barley has found a way to be a useful farm dog after all.

A quail in the bush...

Unlike the rest of our birds, our quail cannot be allowed out in the pasture to free range. The problem is quail are not domesticated like most of our other fowl. If allowed out, they just don't come back. In fact, when we released the first batch of adult quail into their spacious indoor/outdoor pen, we had a number of birds just disappear. It took us a while to find and patch all the tiny, quail sized escape routes. 

  
About a week ago, I started a little experimental project in the quail pen. Quail are ground birds who like to hang out in tall grass and under scrubby bushes. For a long time, I had been cutting armfuls grass and bringing them in for the little birds to nibble on and burrow under. I finally got the bright idea to try and plant some of the taller tufts of grass in their pen.

The little birds thought this was brilliant. I had barely finished patting down the dirt around the first plant when I was swarmed with curious little quail who immediately started nibbling on the lower stalks and burrowing their way into the plant.

 Can you spot the birds in the bush? 

It's been about a week. I've added three more plants and all are thriving. The quail are loving them and having taken to laying their eggs under the cover of the bushes. I have to say it's a lot easier to look under the plants than to tip toe around pen in work books trying not to trample the eggs they used to bury under their bedding.

Weathering Isaac - Pt 2

I woke with the dawn on Thursday morning and looked out our bedroom window. I didn't even recognize what I saw at first. Our bridge was under about 4ft of water, the creek that runs just behind the 1st pasture had topped its banks during the night and flooded our pasture! Even more alarming was realizing that the waters had reached our poultry pens. I shook Big Onion awake and we quickly threw on clothes and headed out back.

There was a good 1.5-2 ft of water flooding our pens closest to the creek. Big Onion came out of the silky pen with all four new chicks drowned. Bianca was such a good mother that she was trying to keep them warm even as the waters came up. Our poor little bantam chickens were barely able to keep their heads above water. We quickly bundled all three chickens in towels, dried them as best we could, and set them up in a raised cage in the poultry house.

The quail pen had some water, but I gave them some plastic pallets to climb on to get up out of the water and they seemed ok. When I went back to check on them later, the water had risen again and one quail had drowned. This was prompting enough for us to scoop up all 40+ birds and tuck them into another raised cage to dry off. Again there were a couple birds that seemed stiff and cold, but were soon back to normal once they got warm and dry. I have to hand it to those tiny birds, they never missed a stride through the whole thing. They stayed very calm, and many of the girls actually laid eggs while crammed into a rather tight space.

After losing one of the quail, we decided to just move all the rest of the birds out of the flooded pens. I think the chickens were happy to be on dry ground, but less than pleased that all 8 of them had to share one cage. They were also inexplicably terrified of the young Buff chicks in the next pen, all cowering in one corner of the cage behind their giant white rooster protector.

The adult turkeys and guineas were muddy and soggy, but their pens still had dry ground so they stayed put.

While all the other birds were doing their best to stay dry, the ducks and geese were pleased as punch with the pond we installed in their pen. They had 2 ft of water and were going to town splashing and playing in their new lake/pen.

In the morning, we tossed a wooden pallet in the pen just so they could get up and out of the water if they wanted. By afternoon when the waters just kept rising, we decided to move them to the relatively dry ground of the goat pen. Neither the ducks nor the goats were pleased with this decision.

Meanwhile, the wind kept blowing and the rain kept falling in waves. All day Wednesday we saw the poor sheep rushing out of their enclosed area whenever there was a break in the weather to get as much grazing as they could before the pouring rain would drive them back under cover. Thursday morning, their normal cover was under water so Big Onion walked them up near into goat pen, and we gave them some grain to eat.

 Well, after we moved the ducks up, we had to close the goat pen off to the sheep and just as we were headed back inside, it started to pour again. Pepper, our friendliest sheep, rain straight to us for help with the rest of the flock close at her heels. I did some fast thinking and with a call of "Sheep sheep!" led the girls into the nearby covered area where we keep the 4 wheeler. I was so amazed they followed me, even more amazed that they thought to turn to us for help in a time of crisis.

 Our second pasture beyond the trees under about 5-6ft of water. We would need a boat to get to the rest of our property.

You can actually see the current of water flowing into our pasture in some of these pictures.

One of the scariest things we saw checking out the flooding were these floating islands of red ants. They were also swarming all over the buildings. The surface of the water was also swarming with tiny little floating spiders. Big Onion and I came away with more insect bites than we could count every time we went out to check on everyone. We both ended up with angry red rings around our calves just at the point where our boots end.

Early in the afternoon we started hearing reports of a possible dam break in a major river that runs just a few miles from our house.  We had already spent the day plucking sodden distressed birds from the water and watching the water level in our pens go up and up. The radio was talking about mandatory evacuations and 17 ft of water. I'm not ashamed to admit I had more than one moment of panic that day. Big Onion and I talked about what we would do if we were forced to leave. Do we just open cages and pens and leave the birds and rabbits to fend for themselves? We talked about packing all the dogs and cats in his car and the goats into mine, moving the sheep to the higher ground of the backyard and just hoping we would have something to come back to.

I sat down with the handy deck of cards and started playing solitaire to keep myself busy while Big Onion tried to catch a little sleep. I kept telling myself if I could just win one game, just one game, everything would be ok. The power would come back and the water would go down. It took about 5 or 6 games, but I finally won one. I actually woke poor Big Onion up to say I had won at solitaire, everything would be ok! I kid you not, the words had barely come out of my mouth went the power blinked on! (Note from Big Onion: This is true. Creepy, but true!) We turned on the news and learned that we were too far away from the river for a dam break to effect us. Not long after that, the water levels started very slowly going down again.

By Friday morning, the creek was back within its banks and the bridge was miraculously still in place. We were left with a muddy, soggy mess of a barnyard. I actually had to go to work down in New Orleans, so poor Big Onion was left by himself to put new bedding down in all the pens and relocate the birds back where they belong. The last and biggest duck pen is still a mud pit so the waterfowl will be double bunking it for a while. We also have a lot of debris and fallen branches to clean up and some fences to repair. Unfortunately, my garden was all but destroyed. The corn, for sure, has seen much better days...

This picture was taken well after the storm had passed.

All in all I feel like we were extremely lucky. We lost a few young birds, but overall there was no major building damage, our house did not flood, and we came through unharmed with almost all of our animals healthy and safe. There is still a lot of work to do to get things back to normal, but I think we'll be ok.

Quails a'plenty

We got quails! 

After a short two weeks in the 'bator, the quail eggs started popping like popcorn. 

 Of the fifty-something eggs we put in to cook, we ended up with 39 walnut sized, chipmunk colored quail babies or "cheepers." 

This time I got smart and lined the brooder box with puppy pee pads. They are absorbent, offer better footing than newspaper, and I can toss them when they get too soiled (which happens pretty quick with almost 40 little birds all pooping in the same area). I used to use towel to line the brooder, and boy was that a gross cleanup job.

 The brick is in the brooder to absorb heat from the lamb and help keep the tiny little guys warm.

These cheepers are so tiny that the regular crumbled poultry food is too big for them. We have to toss cupfuls into the food processor before offering it to them.

So what does fate hold for these little guys? 

Since we had a number of adults disappear on us, we will be using a lot of the females from this group to restore our numbers. The males will probably end up as food.

Unfortunately since the law considers quail to be game birds instead of poultry, we cannot legally sell them for human consumption. Luckily, there is a good market for exotic meats for raw cat and dog food in our area so any extra males will be processed and sold for healthy, natural pet food. 

ETA: Here is a little video I took on my phone of the day old babies. Everything looks red because the are under an infrared heat lamp.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaaHcqsUGD4&feature=g-upl

The case of the disappearing quail

We started out with 16 quail. When they got to be adults, we culled 4 of them (3 males and 1 puny female). That left us with 12 quail all happily living in a spacious indoor/outdoor pen. They seemed very content, even giving us 5-7 pretty little eggs a day. (Quail eggs are great for pickling by the way!)

 Then one day a couple weeks ago the Big Onion decided to do a head count. He came up with 9. We were missing 3 birds. These guys don't get let out every day like the rest of our birds, the door stays shut, and we thought the pen was pretty well secured with a double layer of chicken wired covering the outdoor area. 

I finally discovered one tiny little spot in the front corner of the pen that might be big enough for a quail and blocked it up. 

Then a couple of days ago, I was happily watering the watermelon patch in the garden (one of the few things I managed not to kill) and out pops a little quail! I grabbed a nearby flower pot and tried to catch her, but the little bugger took flight....straight into the back yard where 3 shelties and a Barley were just waiting for an afternoon snack to fly into their laps. 

I started yelling, "LEAVE IT! LEAVE IT! ISWEARTOGODIFYOUTOUCHITIWILLKILLYOU!!!" and all 4 dogs hit the breaks and put on their best "Who us? We would never!" looks. 

I guess this little quail gal picked up some survival skills in her couple weeks 'in the wild' because despite my best efforts, I was never able to catch her. Last I saw, she flew into the neighbor's huge hay field and disappeared into the tall grass. 

So, right now we have 50-something quail eggs in the incubator since our last batch was a complete dud. I blame the automatic turner. That damn thing always gives us terrible hatch rates. 

Hopefully, we can fill out our missing ranks with a good number of females. Keeping our fingers crossed for a successful hatch in a couple of weeks! 

Quails comin

The incubator went into lockdown today. 

We should be lousy with baby quail very soon. I think we have decided that it really isn't worth it to raise quail for meat since it takes at least 2-3 birds to make a decent meal for one person. There does seem to be some interest in the eggs though, so we are going to try and get a few more females from this batch. Right now their enclosure is so big for the few that we have that it is more like a habitat. We have plenty of space for more girls. The males will probably make an appearance on Big Onion's food blog though.