Not a single egg.....EVER

[StephB]

Hi all

I bought 6 quails last spring. I was told they were quite young so would take a white to start laying. But SURELY they should have laid at least 1 egg by now???.

Everything in the orchard is laying, the geese, the ducks and the hens but not a single quail egg???.

Do you think i have been sold a load of duffers?. They just seem to sit in their house all day, they come out abit at dusk when i am putting the rest of the birds away but they are soooo timid and go mad when I approach the cage that I don't hang around to watch them much as dont want them to hurt themselves with their panicked boinging up to the ceiling.

Am i doing something wrong, they seem to be a very unrewarding bird to have.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks
Steph

 

[Marigold]

Hi Steph and welcome to the Forum. Your quail do sound a bit of a puzzle - I have some 3-week old ones on the brooder at the moment that I expect to be laying by 8 weeks. Quail do live life in the fast lane, they are sexually mature by 6-8 weeks and normally live for only 1-2 years so yours are middle-aged by now. I can't understand why the breeder said they 'would take a while to come into lay as they were quite young. '

Three possibilities; do you know what sex they are? And also how much light do they get? And what are you feeding them?
If they are the ordinary brown quail colouring you should be able to see the males have chestnut-reddish breasts with no spots and the females have speckled breasts. If they are fancy colours, especially if they have plain white or gold breasts this won't work. You can sex males by squeezing their rear end to see if a blob of foam appears but if you can't handle yours this will be difficult. Obviously you need females to lay eggs! Have you ever heard any of the males crowing? They have a very distinctive noise, you couldn't miss it, but they have to be mature and in breeding condition to produce it.
The other consideration is light - quail need 14 hours of light a day to lay, either natural or supplemented with electric, so if yours have been in an outside run with no extra light they would have gone off lay throughout the winter and you would expect them to start in April maybe. But this doesn't account for why no eggs last summer of course! They do lay all over the place and eggs can get camouflaged in the bedding or run litter.
And then food - quail need a high-protein diet to lay and although many people feed layers pellets it's better to use something like turkey or pheasant starter crumb. I give mine Garvo Alfachick, which has a lovely mix of small seeds and mini pellets plus little dried shrimpy things and has a protein level of about 23% I think.
Did you ever contact the person who sold you these birds? I do see they are unrewarding but they are generally very prolific layers if given the right conditions and light levels. They do get tame if handled, like chickens, but of course if not handled when young they are very flighty.

P.S. (Edit What sort of housing are they in? I'm also puzzled when you say they 'sit in their house all day and come out at dusk.' Is this a sort of rabbit hutch cage with a 'bedroom'? I kept my first quail in one of those and it was OK except that they hardly ever went in the bedroom and thus it was wasted space. i now have them in open-floored cages with one of those plastic domes you can get for small mammals and sometimes they go in there at night but they're generally active during the day, running around all over the place. If yours spend a lot of time 'indoors' it would have the effect of further cutting down on light.