Currently, in my greenhouse, we have 1 stacked set that has 2 cages my husband built. Gary built them after watching youtube channels about quail with inspiration by those who have much more experience than we have. Based on their designs ours too have a roll-out bottom for catching eggs. As this is in the greenhouse, it doesn’t have a cover on the roll-outs to keep wildlife from getting to any eggs in the tray. Poop collection is done courtesy of trays from O’Rielley’s automotive.
He is building (and almost done with) a second set with hinged covers to catch the eggs as they roll out and protect them from anything that would get in over our fences when the quail cages are moved outside my greenhouse. They will be 5 feet tall and this set (and the following sets he’ll build) has 3 cages. Everything he learned he’d do differently with the first build is being implemented in this set. We will have 6 sets all told when he’s done, plus we’ll be converting a rabbit hutch into a double-stacked grow-out cage. Each cage in the stacker will hold 14 birds,
BEWARE QUAIL MATH:
Here are the numbers as of Valentine’s Day 2022.
We bought 31 adult birds for 40.00 on the day after Christmas, and the number was reduced to 20 by the 15th of January. I learned to harvest my first quail by watching on Youtube and reading about others on Facebook as well as purchasing a book on Amazon about raising quail.
This number then became 29 with hatchlings by January 20. Around the same time, we acquired a 27-gallon reptile tank. Gary created a wire bottom for it so the birds could be elevated above their droppings, and we put pine shavings in before putting the wire in. This rapidly became a recovery cage as we had a few birds from the stacker cage Gary built that didn’t quite like each other, and it got ugly. Into the step up brooder for a week and then we picked up a guinea-pig cage and a cockatiel cage.
The rude birds happened to be egg layers, so we put them in time out inside our house and continued to collect eggs from them. They are Italian Colored Coturnix and a beautiful bird, so they will go into an Italian-only cage when we have enough grown up to support that.
The injured bird healed and is with a small covey of its own in the bottom cage of our first cage set that Gary built.
This followed with another hatch around Feb 7 and brought the sum total up to 49 total as we have 30 hatchlings in 2 different brooders for now. One is that 27-gallon reptile tank with 9 teenagers who will be ready to go to the new cage (and graduate to outside) when our next bunch hatches and another is in a Sterilite bin with a wire cover and a brooder heat plate in it.
We expect to see this happening in about 2 weeks or so.
Those 20 current little guys will graduate to the reptile cage, which will be a bit crowded for their numbers and may need to have them broken down to another (unheated) Sterilite bin. That won’t happen until they are ready to grow out of the clear sterlite bin. Sadly they won’t be old enough to go to the greenhouse but the next batch incubating might, and by then it might be nice enough to brood all these little critters out in my greenhouse. I think I may have to wait until the beginning of April to have the mega incubation and hatch that I want to do – using all 120 spaces in our egg turner with our own eggs. By then this first 9 will be laying their own and contributing to the mega hatch I’m sure.
But bringing it back to current – the day this is posted, February 15, will be a candling day, and we’ll check if the 34 that were put into the incubator on February 9 are viable. They had a harrowing journey in the middle of sub-freezing weather from West Texas (and a great breeder from who we will purchase more eggs in the future) to our little suburban homestead here in the Midwest. Over half were destroyed in shipping that should have taken 2 days, but instead took a week… We will have replacements coming to us for the next hatch as over half the eggs ordered were destroyed in the mail and we’ll put them to incubate on the first of March or so. The majority if not all will be Celedon colored in those, and we’re pretty “Eggcited” about that… We don’t know how many are viable in the incubator, nor what the final hatch count for these will be – but it will bring us up above our current count of 49 birds, that’s for certain. Many of those will go to freezer camp but others, especially hens, will not.
In the meantime, for those of you who are thinking backyard poultry, maybe you hoped you could get chickens for your back yard, but couldn’t as your town doesn’t allow it, and you are thinking quail instead… these little guys are incredibly cold-weather hardy if you house them in your back yard, back room, garage or shed. They are mature at 6-8 weeks old will lay eggs with 14-16 hours of light a day, or you can send them off to boot camp at that stage.
We might get chickens this spring, but if we don’t – it’s fine. Coturnix quail are awesome little critters, and we’re enjoying raising them for their eggs and for meat for the family and those who might want to buy eggs and dressed birds from us for their own family’s consumption.
Annie is a semi-retired homebirth midwife, a doula trainer for the MattieMarie Traditional Birth Studies program, and a farmer’s granddaughter. It all ties into her mad plan to be as self-sufficient as she can while returning to her roots.