To Quail or not to Quail

In anticipation to being a guest on

Pennsif's Alternative Lifestyle Show - MSP Waves Radio - Friday 16 February, 11:35 pm UTC _{(https://steemit.com/mspwaves/@pennsif/msp-waves-radio-pennsif-s-alternative-lifestyle-show-guest-list-for-friday-16-february)}

I'm sharing my homesteading knowledge and experience.

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To Quail
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Between doing graphic design for a living, creating dark surreal art in my free time, and being a land-locked gung-ho sailor, I also have a small homesteading project in our Florida backyard - I’m growing fruit trees and raising Quails that provide us with daily batches of comically tiny but delicious eggs.

I started this little hobby about two years ago, after reading about how much healthier quail eggs are compared to that of a chicken, and how easy and inexpensive it is to raise them in an urban area. Before that I knew very little about these birds, in fact I hadn't even tasted quail eggs before then.

Of course, since then, I've learned quite a bit about the pros and cons of raising quails; and so, those who are considering starting a homesteading project, might find this information interesting and hopefully even useful.

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Getting the Quails
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We decided to start our project with 10 quails (nine females and one male). We found a place in Miami that was selling quails and bought the 10 juveniles (at about 2 weeks old) for 15$ total ($1.5 per quail)... We transported all 10 in a small cat cage.
At this age its a little difficult to tell males and females apart, so we were a little worried that we might have gotten all 10 females, but luckily, one of the quails did start to show more of the male features after another week.

The biggest indicator of gender in quails is their chest area. Females have speckled chest feathers, while the males have a plain orange-brown chest. Behavior-wise, females are very calm and quiet, while the males are slightly more animated and begin to vocalize early on (with a sound that is much more pleasant than a rooster).

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Building the Cage Delux
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So right from the get-go, we went slightly overboard with the cage. We build it at about (8'L x 2'H x 2'W) using wooden pallets. Considering that a quail requires only one square foot of space to live comfortably this was a 5 star resort. I learned that quails are very low maintenance birds. Unlike chickens, that need a raised-coop with nesting areas; quails require no such luxury. They can spend the night outside snuggling together, and they lay eggs on the ground without much ceremony.

Quails need a lot of light in order to produce eggs, so the roof of the coop is a white plastic sheet that illuminates the interior during the day. The top of the cage is mostly a metal net and also more white plastic.

its very important to make several access doors into the cage so that you can easily reach to every corner of the cage.

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Eggs
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The harvest is what this is all about. Besides being cute as hell, quails get very productive at about 8 weeks old (2 months). In a stress-free environment, with the right nutrition and plenty of sunlight a female quail lays one egg as often as once a day. Having the male present means that eggs will be fertilized. For the females we get special feed that is protein and calcium enriched - to produce the egg shell, otherwise they will loose their own bone mass, and live shorter.

I wont go too much into how to cook the eggs, but they can be prepared just like regular eggs. The only difference is that quail eggs take much less time to cook - about 1/4 of the time that it would take to boil a chicken egg. Also the difference in flavor is very slight, buy to me quail eggs taste a little creamier than regular eggs, even though they contain less fat.

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Ridiculously Cute, but...
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10 Quails are enough to start a farm. Instead of eating the eggs we decide to hatch them. Female quails in captivity are not very maternal and cannot be expected to be broody, so we had to buy an incubator online for about $50, and collected 40 eggs to try to hatch them. I was told that it takes about 18-24 days for the chicks to fully develop, and typically if only 1/4 of the eggs hatches, that is a successful result. Sure enough, after several weeks of nonstop incubation (and electric bill increase), we were able to get 11 chickies; with a unfortunate later discovery that six of them were males.

Though adorable as hell, they are very hassle-some and cost quite a bit of electricity to keep alive for the first two weeks. They require a heating lamp 24/7, constant feeding and water replacement. Looking back at the experience, I concluded that it would have been easier and cheaper to simply buy more juvenile quails than to try to hatch them. Still, it was a fascinating experience - they were irresistibly precious.

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Accidents Happen
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After doubling their numbers, we are down to 12 after only a few months. Quails can be very fragile and stupid. The excess of males caused them to fight and gang up on each other. They are tiny birds but it turns out they can get pretty brutal and sometimes fatally would each other in a fight. We also lost a couple due to stupid circumstances: one flew up and hit her head on the ceiling of the cage, another got stuck between a rock and a hard place (literally) and died of hydration. Also several simply escaped due to the negligence of the owners ;). There are also sicknesses and predictors that try to get them from time to time. Luckily we haven't had any issues with diseases or predictors.

But it is all just part of homesteading; it requires a little bit of detachment from the idea that these are pets, and sometimes tough decisions have to be made in order to restore balance and productivity. With that said, I haven't yet got the courage to use the quails for anything other that laying eggs.

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To Quail Still
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I would definitely recommend other homesteaders to consider raising quails, especially in the warmer regions. I know people who started raising quails as a hobby and then turned it into a little business. For me, I would just like to keep feeding my family with home grown foods. The biggest pro to me of course, is that quails provide a healthier alternative to buying supermarket eggs with questionable farming practices, and I know that my food comes from a healthy stress-free happy birds.

So I will leave you with this information for now.

Thank you for reading!

-A N K A P O L O

Source {all photos were taken by me}