quail querie
- Thread starter dye29
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- Hampshire, U.K.
Get a copy of this book; Practical Quail-Keeping – by Sarah Barratt.
Several listings on Amazon, secondhand around £10-£12, or order it from your local public library.
Excellent book, will tell you all you need to know. It has quite a few pics of my own setup and quails as well.
There's a lot of videos on You Tube as well, just enter Coturnix in the Search box.
I kept Coturnix quails, the sort that lay eggs which are big enough to eat. They come in a variety of pretty colours. They are easy to hatch so long as you hardly add any water to the incubator - they are sensitive to too much humidity. The males are very rough on the females when they mate them and I found there were some distressing injuries to the females, but once I had culled all the boys the females lived happily together and laid reliably for several years. You need to expect far more boys than girls when you hatch.
4-5 quails would need a run 4ft by 4ft minimum. They need to be kept dry and sheltered from wind, especially in winter. I moved mine in to special cages with little LED lights on a timer in winter and they carried on laying. They smell much more strongly than hens do and its more difficult to keep the cages clean as they do tiny poos all over the place.
There are also Chinese quails, also known as button quails, which are tiny birds, and these are easier to tame and one male will live happily with 3 females, so maybe more suitable as pets than coturnix.
i found mine were quite a steep learning curve, as they were very different from chickens, both in their needs and their behaviour.
Several listings on Amazon, secondhand around £10-£12, or order it from your local public library.
Excellent book, will tell you all you need to know. It has quite a few pics of my own setup and quails as well.
There's a lot of videos on You Tube as well, just enter Coturnix in the Search box.
I kept Coturnix quails, the sort that lay eggs which are big enough to eat. They come in a variety of pretty colours. They are easy to hatch so long as you hardly add any water to the incubator - they are sensitive to too much humidity. The males are very rough on the females when they mate them and I found there were some distressing injuries to the females, but once I had culled all the boys the females lived happily together and laid reliably for several years. You need to expect far more boys than girls when you hatch.
4-5 quails would need a run 4ft by 4ft minimum. They need to be kept dry and sheltered from wind, especially in winter. I moved mine in to special cages with little LED lights on a timer in winter and they carried on laying. They smell much more strongly than hens do and its more difficult to keep the cages clean as they do tiny poos all over the place.
There are also Chinese quails, also known as button quails, which are tiny birds, and these are easier to tame and one male will live happily with 3 females, so maybe more suitable as pets than coturnix.
i found mine were quite a steep learning curve, as they were very different from chickens, both in their needs and their behaviour.