What if I Wanted to Raise Quail...

Getting started with Coturnix Quail doesn’t have to be overwhelming, join Jennifer and Carey who have literally hatched tens of thousands of quail, give you the info you need to get started and why.

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  Hi, and welcome to the Poetry Nerds podcast. I'm Carey Blackmon, and I'm here with my co-host for the show, Jennifer Bryant. And we are here to help you figure out how to raise the healthiest, happiest, and highest quality birds possible. So today we're gonna talk about why would you wanna keep quail, why would you wanna keep quail? Why do I wanna keep quail? Yeah. Why would you wanna, why would somebody wanna keep quail? Why would our listener wanna do that? So many reasons. First of all, you would never have an egg shortage. That would be a good one. You'd always have eggs. You could have meat if you wanted to do that, you'd be just a tad bit more self-sufficient. They have a quick turnaround. They take up a small footprint. Anybody can have them, no excuses, and they're pretty easy to take care of. Does that sound like a dream farm animal? It does. I have a a lady, the, that my wife works with. And her husband live in an apartment. And she found out that I kept quail and she was like, I like that little noise that they make. And I'm, I just started laughing and I said, are you talking about the ones that the roosters made? And she said, yes, I love that sound. I can remember when I was a kid, I used to sit and listen to'em and it was just so relaxing. And I said, okay. And she said I wish I could have those. And I said why don't you get'em? And she said, they don't allow animals in our apartment complex. And I said, you could probably get you a rabbit hutch or something like that. You got a back deck? She said, yeah, we have a deck, we got a grill back there, table, all that kind of stuff. I sit out there and read all the time. I said, Reed, do you have enough room for a bookshelf? And she said, yeah, now she has quail on that bookshelf. That's right. And she was amazed to find out that most quail lay over 300 eggs a year. Yep. Pretty awesome. It takes three quail eggs to make one chicken egg. If you need to do a recipe, give or take. But if you can put a Coturnix quail in an apartment, that would be awesome. But if you have a super strict, apartment complex, you could get away with button quail. Okay. So if you live in a super strict apartment complex, you could probably get away with button quail. Now they're more like a parakeet or maybe like songbirds. They're very small, three ounces or so, maybe four ounces, and they lay little tiny eggs. But they're edible and they lay every day. You might have to crack 25 of them to make an omelet, but that's still a step at self sufficiency. Now, with the button quail, if I remember right. Didn't I see one time you posted? Some pictures of yours in an aquarium? I do. I had'em in an aquarium. I still have some in an aquarium. We've upgraded since then'cause we have so many. But Guinea pig cages. Hamster cages. They don't have to be tall, they don't fly like a parakeet. They're ground birds. They don't perch. They wanna be down in the shavings or whatnot. They need a hide. You can turn over a basket. We use coffee cans. We cut out a hole and they jump in there. They're super easy to keep. That would be neat. So if somebody was wanting to dip their toes into homesteading, they could essentially get an aquarium inside their house or their apartment. Like other people have fish. Put'em a couple button quail in there. Yep. And nobody would really ever know. The girls don't make any noise. And the boys, they, coo like a dove. It's a very soothing sound. It's not shrill. Nobody would ever associate that with any kind of animal in your bar, in your apartment. They're tiny. It couldn't be too loud. No, but now if they got loose or something, they do fly like a parakeet. You might have to, pull the blinds down or something to try to catch'em. We go to the dollar store and get the hummingbird nets out of the kids section and that's how we catch'em when they get loose. That's awesome. This morning Kevin called me and he's the entire juvenile cage got loose last night and I've been chasing him for 30 minutes out here. So he is those are not fun to catch. And the cats were trying to help, so he was fighting with the cats, trying to catch the birds. So note to self button, quail are a lot more active than Coturnix. They are. You definitely would want to have a lid on said, aquarium or Guinea pig cage. But as long as you were aware that they can do that, it is fine. That's hilarious. Yeah. So they're just fun to watch and if the kids were growing up in an apartment, it would be neat to be able to show them, Hey, we can feed these and they'll lay an egg and we can have this egg for breakfast. We can save eggs all week long and have breakfast on Saturday mornings because there eggs. It would be a way to do it together. Yeah. Yeah. It would be cool for the kids, if they were living in an apartment. Okay. So if we're trying to figure out what would be right for us. Button quail would definitely be a good option if you're in an apartment. Possibly maybe a small, like regular Coturnix not jumbos, maybe. I think that there is an odor factor difference there. For some reason, the button quail don't have the amount of ammonia smell, but if you stayed on top of it, sure, yeah. You could do it. Okay. What about, let's say I live in a neighborhood and I can walk outta my back porch and see three different neighbors, but I still want to have some quail. Which ones would be right for that? In a really strict HOA on top of it. Yeah. Bump of HOA. We don't like HOAs. Let's just go down the list of the most strict to the least strict. So if you have three nosy neighbors and a strict HOA, you know what I have always envisioned like drawing up and maybe trying to sell or at least promote would be a park bench. So you put a park bench out in your back porch or in your little flower garden or whatnot. And the bottom of the park bench, like the four legs, you would screen those in and the seat would lift up and there would be your quail hens. How cool would that be to like be sitting on your quail hutch? That would be cool. Hey, they do it with dog cages. The, I've seen dog kennels that were like end tables and coffee tables and things like that. So why not have a quail aviary? It would be outdoors. They could fly in it a little bit. I think that would be a great idea. But if you really wanted to hide them from your neighbors, you could literally be sitting on them and wave at your nosy neighbor and go, I don't know what you're talking about. Seriously. And if you only had hens, honestly they don't really make a whole lot of noise. They kind of chatter. Sometimes the roosters will crow, but if you put a nice water feature beside your park bench, nobody's ever gonna know that from a, an obnoxious crow up in the tree. I would be the one that would be like, oh my God, do you hear that? And I, I would know it was my one of my roosters, but I don't, I hear it too. What is that? And the whole time the rooster would just be going crazy shut up. That's one thing that I've always I, I understand, some chickens, I have some that are large and they got some bass behind their crow, so I could understand why an HOA wouldn't want those in the neighborhood. But a quail to me, that should be a different ball game because you have Bob Whites that could very well fly in a tree and not belong to anybody. Oh, yeah. Mockingbirds are some of the loudest ones around here. They harass my cat sometimes, so I. But if you just wanted eggs, you could just keep hens and don't ask, don't tell your neighbors that would, they would never honestly know. And what you just said is something that I have found that blows a lot of people's mind. Everybody thinks you gotta have a rooster to have eggs. Oh no. And I'm like, no, because, these commercial houses where they have all the eggs to go to the grocery store they don't have a bunch of roosters there too. Most of them just have hens doing their job. No. Popping out the eggs and the Coturnix as a general rule, they won't fly like a bird, like they may flutter out. But then they'll just land and you can very easily catch'em with the. Butterfly net from Dollar Tree. Or just walk over there and pick'em up. Most of mine, they just get down and they'll look up at me like, now what do I do? Pick me back up and put me back in my house, they're pretty mild tempered. I had some get out the other day and they were in my barn and I was like, I'm gonna find them sooner or later. And then they when got out and got in the grass and it just looked at me and it was like, what are you doing? And I was like, what are you doing? And I reached down and I picked it up and that was that. They didn't try to fly away. And that's the other thing is, and you need to make sure you're getting these from breeders who breed for Temperaments because you do not want one in an apartment setting or an HOA setting that is just obnoxious and wants to fight with you all the time. You want to get temperament bread. Quail. Yeah. Because I imagine if you had some crazies your HOA Karen would definitely be beating on your door at two o'clock in the morning, and that wouldn't be a good first experience for somebody like dipping their toes at self-sufficiency, unlike, unlike me and you who just cannonball into the whole process. Some people wanna to dip their toes gently and so button quail or Coturnix bread for temperament. And that would be just some gentle ripple in that pool of farm life, and it could either be one of those, Hey, I like it. We're gonna start looking for land. And, or it could be, this is really annoying. And you just. Post'em up. Hey, looking, these things are looking for a new home up for discussion, and they'll find a new home pretty quick. Yeah, they will. So could you imagine if you live in your HOA or on your apartment balcony and you had some pots of some fresh lettuce and a little tomato plant and a bucket growing, and you had your fresh eggs for your boiled eggs on your salad. How cool would that be to say, Hey, you know what, I do live in an apartment, but I grew this stuff from my lunch all by myself. That would be pretty neat. I guarantee you there's a sourdough starter kit on the counter. Maybe sitting on the bar or something along those lines. Yeah. All right. So let's say you move out of the HOA into just a general purpose subdivision. You have your nice half acre lot, you have some trees, you have a privacy fence. Now you can really get into some quail. Now you can have a 8 by 10 shed. You can put rabbit hutch style cages out. You could build an aviary that you can walk in and sit down with your birds and they can have, I don't know, rocks to play on. And you can really get elaborate with some setups if you have a little bit of space. I have seen some pretty elaborate setups and some of them I'm like, these, where do the people have this much time to put all this together? It's like a little quail haven. I know, right? There. So first of all, they can live outside year round. You do not have to bring them in the winter time. I don't even care if you live in Idaho. You can still leave them outside. You're just gonna wanna give them a little bit of shelter to get out of the muck or the wind if the, if they want to. So they may be standing outside going, woo hoo, look at that snowflake. But you could, you can put'em in stack cages out on the backside of the barn. You can get old rabbit hutches and repurpose them and keep them. You can, I've seen this before on the raised beds. You could build a cage that sits on the rails of your raised beds and just move them along and it self compost basically onto the beds themselves. And you don't even have to clean up after'em. Okay. So that brings me the one that I've been working, so I've seen in a lot of groups, people talking about putting quail and aviaries outside and more specifically putting them in tractors. Okay. So I have an Alumi-Coop dealership, and they have a small one that's a five by six, five feet wide, six feet long. So I'm gonna build, my wife has always said she wanted some flower beds in front of the house. Just to give it a little extra, some street appeal or curb appeal or whatever you call it, even though we're on a dead end road. So I'm gonna build some of those that are just a little over five feet wide and I'm gonna throw some quail in there and let'em do their thing. For a few weeks, and then I'm gonna move it forward a little bit, and then I'm gonna move it forward a little bit. And then I'm gonna go get'em all out of there. And then I'm gonna take that, take the tractor out of the flower bed, and then I'm gonna have this little tiny quail aviary that just goes back and forth across my front yard. Because, I'm doing research for the people here. So many people say, can you tractor quail? And on these, on the five by six, they have the wheels that come down in the back when you lift the handle up in the front. And I've looked, and if a quail is right there, they could slip up underneath it. But if I have somebody behind it to where they'll want to come forward I don't think they'll come out. I think you could tractor your quail know I. I don't think that a quail tractor is probably what Tamara had in mind when she asked for some flower boxes and curb appeal. But you need to ask her tonight. I feel overly confident that when she comes home and sees that she has flower beds and she knows that she's not gonna have to maintain them, that she'll be happy. Okay. You're the one that has to live with her, so let me know how that works out for you. Now I understand the tractor inside the flower bed maybe bit much. I don't know if I'm gonna get away with that, but it's really good fertilizer, right? I have great carrots in it. There is a lady that I follow that coincidentally, she was a teacher too. I follow her blog. She quit teaching and now she does homesteading at her house and she built some tractors. And what she'll do is in the off months, she puts hens, some of her hens in the tractors, in her flower beds or in her garden beds. And then when, she'll move'em from one to the next throughout the cooler months and she'll till it in and raise all kinds of vegetables and stuff like that when it comes back. So I just have to answer the question, can you, tractor quail that's something that's been asked. So I'm gonna do the research. Yeah. You come back and let us know how that works. As far as the manure from the quail, we do need to tell our listeners that is a hot manure and technically should be composted for 6, 9, 12 months, depending on what all you got in there. So if you have lots of it, then definitely pile up. But if you're just talking about little bits of it, by all means just mix it into your soil. I'm gonna till it in and call it a day. That's right. All right, so now you've got your half an acre, you've got your, you've got your rabbit hut style, and now, you really gotta, you've gotta pack'em in there. So you have a storage barn. How big is your barn for your quail? Like 12 by 12. The barn that, the area that I use for quail. It is roughly 12 by 20. Yeah. So you could put a storage barn in your backyard, in your subdivision and put an exhaust fan on it in the summer and put quail in it and nobody would still know. No, because I got, I have, I wanna say it's a 36 foot, maybe a 34. And the last bit of it is my incubator room. And I, in the other 20 feet, I have 5 stacks. In, just in there. And I have plenty of room for feed storage and all that other stuff too. And Yeah. Nobody knows. Nobody knows what's in it because like what you said, I've got an exhaust fan to 20 inch exhaust fan in the top at the back. Strategically put a window in one of the sides up towards the front. Crack that thing open. Turn the fan on. You can go in there and it'll pull any smells out in a matter of minutes. That's right. That's right. And so at that point, you're gonna be even more self-sufficient because not only do you have the eggs and you don't have to wait for Saturday morning to have enough, but you can have eggs every day. You could pickle eggs and sell them. You can harvest the meat for yourself, for your friends, for your family, for your dogs, for your cats. What else can you do with, you can make arts and crafts with wings and feet and skulls. People do that. You can, and I gotta say I gotta interrupt for just a second because. When you say that there's gotta be a lot of our listeners that are like what in the world? Yes. And I fully get it because that was my exact same expression. We have a mutual friend that when I first heard her say that, I was like, where's my car keys? I need to make, I need to make sure I have a way out. But then I started seeing pictures and like earrings charms for necklaces. Things that you would never imagine what they really were, but they were beautiful. Yeah. Just go on Etsy and look for quail jewelry or quail decor. You can take the feathers and make Reese, you can make cat toys. You can make I don't know. I'm not a crafty person, I don't care. But there's a lot of things you could do to'em. But I do dehydrate wings and sell to bird dog people. I have dehydrated the feet and tried to feed them to my barn cats.'cause that's all I have is barn cats. And they just looked at me like, whatever, I'm just gonna go out in the field and get me some fresh ones. But I think an apartment cat person might like that, yeah. They don't, they can't go out in the field. Let's see, what else can you do with the quail? You can eat'em, you can put'em on the barbecue, you can bake'em, chop'em up. Right now I have two little dogs in the house. I have a Chihuahua and a Shih Tzu. Right now they're eating quail, pumpkin, and carrot for breakfast in the morning. And they love it. So I was being I was talking to somebody last Tuesday and they asked me what my favorite type of quail was. And I had to say barbecue. Yeah. They're, the meat is very lean. I won't say it tastes like chicken, but I will say it is a bird. But I enjoy it. It's lean, it's healthy, and it, it's one of those things where, okay, you live in a neighborhood, so you're not really a farmer. But that's something you can say, I know what that animal ate because I fed it and now it fed me. Um, that's, to me, that's empowering to be able to control what you eat, if that makes sense. Oh, yeah. It's a way to make sure you have healthy stuff. Yeah. And you, if your favorite is barbecue. My favorite actually is I like to eat wings dipped in blue cheese. So my son actually smokes the legs and we toss them in hot sauce and we eat them in lieu of or of hot wing. I see. See, y'all can't see the look on his face. He is like, so the dogs can have the breast meat and I'll just eat the wing part. That's definitely a mini wing. It is, but I know where it came from. It's not some gigantic thing run through a commercial processing house. True. But you know what we didn't talk about though, for people who are in a subdivision is they don't, wouldn't know about harvesting the meat. I'm sure,'cause I can think back before I, I was aware of it. We did it as a kid but a chicken, you have to grow it out. You have to, dispatch it, then you would have to pluck it and part it out and all of those kinds of things. And that's a process. And it's, if you don't know what you're doing, it can be a time consuming process. But, and you have to have space to do it and water, you have to have a hose and all those kinds of things. It can be a little messy. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's a big, it's a big messy. And we do a lot of birds at the same time, so we actually run the mower over all the feathers and try to chop'em up. But the quail, you just need a pair of scissors. You can do it in your lawn chair. Yeah. I saw a video that Terry had done and he, the shears that he uses those things, I'll just say they have a lifetime warranty and they're really sharp. And if one of a parent, your kids cut something they shouldn't, you can actually send it back and they'll sharpen'em for you. Yeah. I have a parent. They're really nice. But you could take those things and pop the dispatch, wait about a minute, get your legs and whatever else you want off and, use your thumbs and separate the feathers off the breasts at the same time. Pull it out and you're done. Yeah, I can do one in under a minute. So it's, it is pretty, it is a lot quicker. And like you said, if you're thinking about chickens and all the stuff you have to have, I mean for this really, you just need kitchen scissors. Yeah. Kitchen scissors in a bucket. Yeah. Now when I first started, I wore the gloves and the, and I was like, I don't know what I even wanna say. Like I had a plan. Now I'm just like, gimme a bucket back of the gator. Scissors done. My, yeah. Yeah. I can remember when I was a kid going dove hunting and quail hunting. You have this thought and the way that you see it done inside the kitchen, and then you see the way it's done in the field and it's a little different. Yeah. I've had people ask me to make videos and we've actually done it a couple times and we sat down and we watched'em afterwards and we both said, no. Nope. We just delete'em. No. Somebody's gonna have something to say about that and it's not gonna work out to your favor. Yeah, it is definitely not OSHA rated. No. Okay. So now let's say you outgrow your little half acre lot and you really wanna get into this big time. You have outgrown this show at that point and now you are one of us and we welcome you to the club. Yeah. The thing that I tend to caution people when they talk to me about quail and they ask me about it, I say, listen, have you heard of chicken math? Everybody's heard of chicken math. They all know what that is. And I say, quail math is worse. It's a multiple. It's worse. Yep. Yep. So be careful. So for people who don't know, I have a 30 by 50 barn at this point, and um, the quail have actually taken over and I would have to estimate how many birds are in the barn, but it would be at least 2000 birds in the barn at this point, at any given point. So just absorb that for a minute. And how long ago did you start with quail? It's been a few years. Yeah. But I have four cabinet right now. It's February. I have four cabinet incubators. They're all full. So that just means what I. Twenty-five twenty-eight hundred eggs in the incubator at any given time. Some of them are double stacked, so it could actually be closer to 3000. I I realized that the the blue trays that have become popular, you can put, I wanna say it's ninety-six quail eggs in those, the decent sized, jumbo ones. And you can stack those on the top and bottom, top and middle row of some incubators. And you're like, oh, there's 800. Wow, I have too many. Yeah. What am I gonna do with those when they all hatch? So I can't double stack the ones you're talking about. Now, the original GQF style ones for the GQF, I have two 1502 and I have the original trays that go with those. I can double stack those if I'm put in my smaller eggs. But once those bigger eggs go into the dark blue trays that you're talking about, those eggs are so big that I actually can't double stack them. It will crack the eggs. I do have to be very selective with mine. Because if I don't put ones that are all the same size, give or take a gram, I can't stack'em. So what I have found is like I put my button, the buttons will actually fit on those GQF trays. They won't fall through. And so those are fantastic for the bottom tray. And then I can put the larger eggs on top, or the Celadon eggs are a more consistent 12 to 14 gram size. And I can use that as a bottom tray. Or if I'm doing like small baluts, small pet baluts, then those fit in those smaller, those are smaller eggs. So I just have to, you just have to be careful where you put stuff in there. It would not shock me if you went out there right now. And my hatching time, I had removed the black water tray out of the bottom and there was a hatching basket in the bottom. Because I have been known to double stack and show stuff everywhere in there. I will say this I don't know where my black water tray is. That goes in the bottom because you can take those baskets and sit too in the very bottom. And then stack some on top to where you can get three levels high in the amount of space that is only two of the racks that they have in there. We sound like lunatics. It's being used for a hatcher. So we have to stop enabling, each other. It is all in research for our listeners. Okay. So just forgo the rails then in the hatch and time incubators and just stack those hatching trays in there. I'll say past, past three levels, it's hard to get stuff in and out. So I just stack three on the bottom and then I go back to using the basket because that is for convenience and a lot of painters tape, I like white painters tape'cause you can write on it and it's the same color as the incubator. Blue painters tape works really well too when you're trying to keep things separate. I use lavender painters tape. Whoa. Lavender painters tape. I do. Yes. Okay. Okay. All right. Now I can't think of a reason not to keep quail. Is there, would there be any cons to keeping quail? Oh, wait, I do have a con. You must have a plan for the manure. Oh, then there's two. Oh, what's the other one? Your feed bill. Oh, yeah. We don't talk about that though. But you have to have a plan for the poop. You do have to have a plan for the poop because it stacks up quick. It does figuratively. Literally it's, you have two what? Mount Poopmores. Okay. So at the edge of my property there is, I pushed over some land, some stuff to level out my backyard, and so there's a ravine and luckily that, and the occasional 50 pound bag of lime keeps that at bay. But I'm almost to a point to where I'm looking at building some type of raised beds and putting Catawba worms in it. So actually the manure is extremely beneficial. Now I pile mine up. So we use we use shavings in the summertime in the poop trays because it absorbs moisture dries it out, which means the flies don't like it as much. But now we have more land than you do. And I have a chip drop. I have a tree service that drops me tree trimmings. And so we just mix that in with the manure and it composts nicely. And I have raised beds. Several, I have eight at this point, so That sounds good. I have seen in my area, they do offer that the chip drop service. From tree companies. I'm not really sure what 20 yards would look like dumped ever on the edge of my yard. I would say it's a small dump truckload, so I would say maybe two or three pickup truckloads was what it would look like. For me, I'm more thinking along the terms of how much trouble am I gonna get into? Would it be more than the tractor chicken quail tractor in the flower bed or less? Because mean if you convinced her that the compost would then grow her better flowers in her flower bed. I built a house six years ago and we still don't have flower beds. I don't know that she cares a whole lot about it. Mine's four years and we have no landscaping either okay, cool. Because I'm in the barn all the time. I'm in the boundary then, so I'm good. Yeah. I don't know. I guess you have to ask her, not me. what if I wanted Bob Whites, what would that need to look like? So I don't want to say too much about Bob Whites, so I can just tell you what I do know. It takes'em six months to lay where it takes paternics, six weeks to lay and if you want them to know how to fly, you have to keep them in flight pins. Otherwise they just act like a regular coturnix in the wire cages and they don't fly. So the lady that I got my 1502 from, or she originally wanted to start raising Bob Whites and what she had outside for hers. Reminds me of when my son was a kid playing baseball. It's a batting cage. One of the ones that said net. Like it was that big. It was really long, the whole deal. And she was like, oh yeah they'll get in there. They can't get through the net so it works. Perfect. And that's exactly what that is. That's a batting cage. But she said, I've had almost a thousand of them in there at one time. And I'm like, okay. So a Bob White's more like the kind of bird that you're gonna hunt for. So hunting clubs will buy them. When I was a kid they were wild, but we really don't hear them too much anymore. So you have to keep'em in flight cages. It's my understanding anyway, that to, so they know how to fly and then you, when you release'em in the wild, they know how to do that. But I don't really wanna say too much more about'em'cause I really don't know too much about'em. Yeah. I don't know a whole lot about'em other than you. You pretty much have to have an aviary if you're gonna have Bob Whites, because the whole purpose is because they will fly. And there are some other ones. Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released and they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds.gmail.com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning, and keep it egg-citing. This is Cary signing off from Poultry nerds. Feathers up everyone.