Moving the Quail...

So confession time: My coturnix were definitely an impulse purchase.

When I was a kid, Dad had a friend who raised coturnix and he'd send over hard boiled quail eggs and we'd eat them. Tasty and bite sized. I had many fond memories.

So after I had obtained chickens I started doing a bit of light lurking on the Backyard Chicken's quail boards. Started looking at hatcheries but I couldn't figure out what to get. Then Mom told me the magic word: Coturnix, the type of quail that my father's friend had.

Armed with this information, I looked up a bit of information in Carla Emry's Encyclopedia of Country Living (your reference for all things homesteading) and started to research more.

The next day though, a friend (Snoozin' Goose Ranch and Keester Eggs) advertised on facebook that he had three day old coturnix for sale. Me being me? I just packed up the money I had gotten babysitting and picked up 5 fluffy little TINY babies.

Long story short, that was November. When Christmas Eve hit, I got my first egg, a fact which so delighted me that Dad told me to call Seth and he would fund 10 more females for my bevy (a quail flock). We put them inside a chicken house that had been recently built - warm, and adequate but not enough light for egg production.

So I researched and day dreamed through the winter and found that a rabbit hutch was reccomended for coturnix. So, last week, Dad had one built and brought it home. And I moved all the quail into it.

A few hours later, disaster struck I ran outside after helping get hay to find feathers from two bodies and one brown female body laying outside of the hutch with all my other girls and one boy huddled terrified. Note to anyone with dogs NOT raised with poultry. Chicken wire is NOT secure and our Rottweiller and German Shepherd made short work of it. (I barely spoke to the dogs for the last week and I'm the one who feeds the critters!) So Mom and I moved them back into the coop with a few small mishaps.

Dad and I nailed hardware cloth all around the hutch yesterday - hardware cloth is tighter, harder and much more secure for this kind of thing. We had a few mishaps with Dad helping move the quail but he has faster hands than either one of us and it's the first time he had really messed with the quail since around Christmas eve and commented on their size and weights.

Hopefully we will soon be getting eggs, the weather is getting warmer and I"ll be procuring an incubator at that point. I told the one boy that I have left in no uncertain terms that he had a duty to perform and if he did not perform it he would be roast quail and I would replace him! He's an English marked quail (White with a few black spots). Most of the females are common brown (much much prettier) and I have one tuxedo. I want to get some other markings here shortly.

The white ones are also a bit more aggressive and it drives me bats.

Other than that, life on the homestead continues we're prepping for spring and got our seed order in - the Dude and I had a fun time sorting them into several piles.