How to raise button quail
Discover the charming world of button quail! Jennifer shares her journey raising these tiny birds, tips on brooding, feeding, housing, and how custom nutrition boosted hatch rates. Whether you're breeding or keeping them as indoor pets, this episode covers it all. In this episode of the Poultry Nerds Podcast, Carey and Jennifer dive into the care, breeding, and quirks of button quail. Learn how to brood them successfully, avoid feed pitfalls, and why these micro quail are becoming trendy indoor companions. A must-listen for quail lovers and aspiring breeders!
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Carey: 0:23
So on today's episode of the Poultry Nerds podcast we're gonna talk about buttons. We were trying to figure out what we were gonna record about today, and. Jennifer's been working really hard with her buttons lately, and I've been trying to help her out a little bit for the 2 cents that it's worth. And we're like, have we done a podcast on buttons and felt confident that we had, but I actually searched and we never talked about'em. So today we are the cute little, full grown. They're like the size of a. Two week old Eter.
Jennifer: 1:08
Yeah, they're 50 grams when they're full size. But is that two ounces, 50 grams?
Carey: 1:15
Just under two ounces. That two ounces would be 56.
Jennifer: 1:19
Yeah, it is. When you hold them, it's like holding a hummingbird. If you've ever caught a
Carey: 1:23
hummingbird, I like to watch hummingbirds, but I never caught one.
Jennifer: 1:27
They get in our garage. And then we have to c David catches them in his hat to help them out because they get tired and they can't, for whatever reason, they can't see the big doors open. They just bounce around on the ceiling. So he reaches up and catches'em in his hat.
Carey: 1:45
You should put'em some Kool-Aid in there and they can sit with you while you're packing eggs or something.
Jennifer: 1:51
Oh, I already have dirt, Dobbs and wasps and dogs and I don't know, sometimes the ducks find me in the garage and I have to close the doors.
Carey: 2:03
I really think you should get one of your goats in there. No. I'm sorry. I really like mine. They're like a dog that's less annoying. Yeah,
Jennifer: 2:14
I'm a bit over the goats right now, so let's talk about something else.
Carey: 2:18
Look, they will make you want to make up words that are four letters that you should not say while in church.'Cause sometimes you're just, you look at'em and you're like, you're an idiot. But yeah. Tell us about buttons. When did you start working with your buttons?
Jennifer: 2:37
So I went to visit Rebecca about two and a half years ago. So for those of you who don't know, Rebecca and I live about. What about an hour and a half away from each other?
Carey: 2:49
Sounds about right.
Jennifer: 2:50
And so I was up there doing something I remember, and I was sitting on her couch and I'm like looking, I'm like, what is that? And that she had an aquarium under the window and she's those are button quail. I was like, oh, I need to have some of those. Hers wasn't laying right then, and so a couple months goes by and she brings me some eggs. None of those hatch. And so I went on the search and another friend of mine, about 30 minutes away, she had some buttons from Rebecca and she said, Hey, I've got some hatching if you want'em. So I went up there to get'em. But they had, like she took them out of the incubator and put'em in a box and handed them to me. They're too fragile for that, so they didn't even make the 30 minute car ride home. So then I went on the search and found a guy about maybe an hour from me, and he said, I'm over the buttons. You can have the buttons. So I go to his farm to pick up his buttons and he brings out a cage and there's a hundred in there.
Carey: 4:06
And that's like winning the farmer lottery.
Jennifer: 4:09
It was, but it was so fun to go visit his farm. He has zebras and a camel and emus and pheasants and, oh my, is this
Carey: 4:22
like a wildlife reserve or something?
Jennifer: 4:25
No, he just lives up in the hills and just has a fascination with this stuff. And so there's a lady that's local to us that has a traveling, petting zoo, but when her animals like either age out or more or less grow out of too big. To be traveling with her to her pet zoos and stuff. Buys'em from her and then she starts over with younger and they just, it's really weird to be sitting on this guy's patio and the zebras walk by.
Carey: 4:58
I was gonna say that's, that's next level.
Jennifer: 5:01
Yeah.
Carey: 5:02
I gotta say that's. You don't hear that every day.
Jennifer: 5:06
We meet the best people doing this. I just, this is my favorite part of all of this. So anyway, so I take the buttons home and sort them out and start trying to figure out the colors and learning about'em. And honestly, I just wanted. A pair to put in my living room because they coo and the rooster kind of whistles a little bit, but they chatter to each other really quietly. And I really just wanted to put them in my living room. And so I sold off some of the extras and I was just trying to get down to, two or four of them to put in the house and, the oldest son was here and he's, he fell in love with them and he's no, I don't wanna sell anymore. Let's keep'em. I was like, okay. So then people started asking, I was gonna say
Carey: 6:07
He didn't have to ask twice, I'm sure.
Jennifer: 6:10
Oh no. It's birds with, but anyway, so the buttons took off and he started actually going to the reptile shows and selling them is how. Is how the hatching part of it started, and this was all like two years ago, and I just now got my pair of buttons in the house like two weeks ago. Yeah, so anyway, sometimes
Carey: 6:40
that's not a fast pro process to bring something in the house,
Jennifer: 6:44
but I've learned a lot. I've had to figure it out. I've met some really nice people, a lot of interesting people. Doing buttons. Fat Hens is on TikTok and he's made them really popular. And if, have you not watched him Fat Hens on TikTok? No,
Carey: 7:02
I haven't.
Jennifer: 7:02
Oh my gosh. He's calls them and they run to him.
Carey: 7:06
Nuh
Jennifer: 7:06
so he's the one that's made him really popular, but I don't think he sells. And then so anyway, we started offering hatching eggs two years ago not quite two years ago. And they just took off. They're not the, in the off season, they're really not the easiest things to find, this time of beer in the summertime, everybody has eggs. But only the breeders really have'em in the winter, in the spring. So anyway, so I've learned how to take care of'em, and we've learned how to be more efficient with them and how to brew them, hatch them, and brew them successfully. And then we had a feed issue because we couldn't find. Feed that I was happy with. And so you and I kinda worked on that for several months and we've fixed that little issue, I think successfully. So here we are.
Carey: 8:10
Didn't you say your most recent hatch rate was in the high nineties?
Jennifer: 8:14
It was, yeah. It is the highest we've ever had. And yeah, and mortality was super low. Afterwards. Yep.
Carey: 8:26
So how many of those do you have out in the barn? Now
Jennifer: 8:30
We don't talk about numbers. You never ask a lady quail keeper her numbers.
Carey: 8:36
How many aquariums do you have in your broody or incubator room?
Jennifer: 8:43
I have currently one brooder of quail,
Carey: 8:50
so that's what you call that room?
Jennifer: 8:51
No wait. It's just
Carey: 8:52
one single brooder.
Jennifer: 8:54
I lied. We have two. There's two out there.
Carey: 9:01
So one of the things that she discovered is brooding them in aquariums.
Jennifer: 9:07
My, my little totes Yeah. Or
Carey: 9:09
totes is good because those little suckers. Don't you like slow roast'em for the first two weeks of their life?
Jennifer: 9:19
Yeah. Yeah. You cook them. Yeah. But you wanna start at the beginning with the eggs, or you wanna start at the beginning with the bird? Who comes first? Eggs. The
Carey: 9:28
bird had to lay the egg.
Jennifer: 9:30
Okay, so you wanna start with the bird? Okay. So when you take it out of the hatcher, this is the best way to brood them. Put'em in a tote. I would say at least 15 inches deep. I use heat plates, I do not like lamps. Put'em on a puppy pad and put the food directly on the puppy pad with a. Water. A very small water, which you can side note find on my website. So shameless plug on my own website. There we go. For the first few days you just put the food right on the puppy pad because. What's happening is their metabolism is so fast that they need to be immersed in the feed all the time. They need to have it within arm's reach, constantly, the heat. So
Carey: 10:33
are we talking like Wiley, Cote, and Roadrunner Fast?
Jennifer: 10:37
Yes.
Carey: 10:38
Okay.
Jennifer: 10:39
They're crazy. They're very tiny. They're, I think they're like six grams, five grams when they're hatched. They're very tiny. They're smaller than, I took a picture the other day. They're smaller than the cap of a sharpie, stretched out. Yeah. Anyway I. So you've got a puppy pad, you've got a brooder plate. You're gonna, you're gonna tilt that brooder plate. One side's gonna be basically down on the puppy pad. The other side's gonna be about an inch and a half up.'cause they need to be able to duck to go under it, to hide, to touch their backs to it. Feed, ground feed because they are so small. Right on the puppy pad for the first few days. And then warm water. No cold water.'cause you don't wanna chill them and then you wanna leave the light on them all the time. A light in the room all the time.
Carey: 11:43
So don't even do you pull water straight outta the tap.
Jennifer: 11:49
I do, but I have a water heater, so I give him warm water.
Carey: 11:52
Okay, so you do use warm water. You don't use like straight out of the hose pipe or nothing like that?
Jennifer: 11:58
No. Think like human baby bottle warm.
Carey: 12:30
You're talking to a guy that fills his baby's bottles. Outta the refrigerator door
Jennifer: 12:35
okay. Normal mama style. Human baby bottle. Warm.
Carey: 12:41
Hey look, I'm just gonna say it's filtered. And I'm not having to stop driving down the road to find a microwave to warm a bottle.
Jennifer: 12:51
Ugh. Yeah. Give them cold water, not the microwave. Okay, so now that you have them brooding, you need a high. Okay, you're gonna have to help me here. High protein, but it's also the amino acids and the vitamins and all the other stuff that we decided on, right?
Carey: 13:10
Yes. Actually it's not overly high in protein. Let me actually pull that up while we're talking about it. If I remember right on that particular formula, it's like a 24, 20 5%. On the protein. Just because, if you got, if you have good like vitamins, minerals, amino acids, all that good stuff, you don't really need 30% protein. A lot of people think
Jennifer: 13:45
Is it got fat in it too?
Carey: 13:47
Huh?
Jennifer: 13:48
Fat? Is it high? Oh
Carey: 13:49
yeah. There is lots of that. Let's see here.
Jennifer: 13:55
Fat is energy, right?
Carey: 13:57
It helps most definitely. The fat and some of the other stuff convert into the energy. Let's see. Here we go. So it's, I wanna say the fat's 8%, 9%, something like that. It's pretty high and you like pulled that one outta your right outta left field and hit me with that. So the protein on that feeds 24%. The fat is eight is what it says on the guaranteed analysis, but I do know it's a little closer to nine. Because, I made it. Calcium is between 1.2, 1.7. The fiber is five. The lysine is 1.5. The methionine is real kicker at 0.65 and vitamins A, d, and E are pretty high. They're. Like higher than what you would want a breeding foul to have. But
Jennifer: 15:10
this is for the chicks, right?
Carey: 15:11
Yeah. This is for the chicks. Yeah. Those suckers that so talking about the metabolism a regular NICs according to Google, not me. You can email, Google your complaints, not me. Their average heartbeat is 360 times a minute. Buttons are over 500.
Jennifer: 15:31
Holy moly.
Carey: 15:33
Just to put it into perspective. So they're really fast on metabolism and they need that, they don't get 50, so that's obviously not too much fat, but they really. You've found that it works really well for the chicks and you have really good results out of'em. So
Jennifer: 15:57
yeah, it really was a game changer on how many I could successfully get to adulthood
Carey: 16:04
and as a breeder, that's key.
Jennifer: 16:06
Yes. So after, five days or so, then you can start treating'em more like regular little chicks. Put the feed in a feeder. You could probably start turning the light off at night if you wanted to. We're not talking about like a bright light, just something that they can see to be active, can see
Carey: 16:28
their food.
Jennifer: 16:29
Yeah. So then you're gonna leave them on that feed until, I leave them on it until they start laying, and then probably another week or two after that.
Carey: 16:40
See, that's another benefit of not being extremely high with the protein, is you don't have to worry about wearing their kidneys out and stuff like that. So that helps with the longevity of their life, which, people that raise quail, they know that. Anytime after a few weeks, those son guns can just, they're gone for no reason.
Jennifer: 17:06
So we brewed them. Okay, let's, let me back up for just a minute. So they're so fast that they can actually hop out of our brooders, which I think are 15 inches by about week two. Wow. So I have, oh
Carey: 17:23
wow.
Jennifer: 17:24
A window. I use old window screens and put that over the brooders. So after about a week, I'll take the puppy pad out, I'll put'em on pellets because I like stall pellets. No, they're less dusty, last longer. And. You can raise the heat at that point.'cause they really can be off of heat by three or four weeks. Just depends on the time of year and yeah. But they fly. I had one out that got out Friday. I caught her on Sunday. She was loose in my incubator room. But they fly like a sparrow. Flies not like a Kix flies where they just flitter and flop around and stuff. If I. If I have to move the buttons around, I will usually go into my incubation room, close the doors, because if I try to do it in the barn, I do have to make sure my big barn doors are closed, because otherwise they just go straight out the door. Sometimes they fly right back. They're like, oh no, this world's way too big. We're coming right back.
Carey: 18:36
If they went out the back door and they saw one of the pigs, they'd be running, no, don't get me.
Jennifer: 18:42
Yeah sometimes they don't come back. But yeah they fly away. Yeah, so they're gone. And of course, they're so small I can't see them, once they're past five or six feet, I can't see'em without my glasses anyway yeah, but just be mindful of that. Whenever I send Quail home with anybody, I box them up and I give explicit instructions. Do not open this box until you're in the room with the doors closed. And you really need a bird net, like a butterfly net. I have worn out more butterfly nets than I ever care to think about. The one I'm currently using has a hole in it. I need to put some zip ties on it,
Carey: 19:36
so you just get. Nets off of from Dollar Tree or something and scoop'em up.
Jennifer: 19:45
No, you go to bryant re.com and you get them.
Carey: 19:51
Why didn't I think about that?
Jennifer: 19:52
I know we've got this like whole story now. Wait I forget.
Carey: 19:57
But so it's the thing because we were both at one time, had problem out of our incubators, the little switch. And you can't find them. That's definitely not a go to Walmart and get and the only place that I could find them was on the other side of the pond, and I think I had to order like 50 of'em.
Jennifer: 20:20
Yeah. So what you're getting at is as we've grown, then we've had to fix. Supply issues and basically we built our stores back.
Carey: 20:30
Sometimes we have a little extras laying around.
Jennifer: 20:33
Yeah. So we built still brand
Carey: 20:34
new
Jennifer: 20:36
so they don't have button quail stores like on the corner, like Dollar Generals oh my
Carey: 20:42
gosh. Could you imagine if there was like a Quail store or even a chicken store where you could just go in and pick up that kind of stuff? Like you would go to Tractor Supply? Oh, that'd be awesome. It would for us, but for our spouses, they'd be like, have you lost your mind?
Jennifer: 21:05
Okay, once they are done brooding, which for me is when they're ready to start laying eggs, that is when they go into their permanent housing. Now there's a lot of controversy on social media, on what is acceptable. Permanent housing. This is what I'm going to say about that. These are birds that were born in captivity. They don't know anything different than what you were providing for them. Now, their basic needs is food and water and ventilation. But other than that. What you do is you farm your rules. That's right. So there are people that have these elaborate aviaries, which I think are just awesome. But
Carey: 22:03
who remind me to, to tell you about that.
Jennifer: 22:05
Impractical for me. I keep mine on wire. They have plenty of room. They have desk baths, they have water cups. They have. Feed cups, they have nest boxes they have wire walls, so they have lots of ventilation. I feel like they don't know any different. They can't reason so they can't say, Hey, my ancestors, grew up in the rainforest. Why can't I grow up there? They don't think like that
Carey: 22:39
for real.
Jennifer: 22:40
On the flip side of that, I am a hundred percent against taking an animal out of the wild and caging it. So that's my caveat to that. If something is born in captivity, hatched in captivity, they don't have reasoning skills to know any different. So just keep that in mind. They don't have human emotions.
Carey: 23:02
Okay so my silkies don't have human emotions.
Jennifer: 23:08
We don't talk about, I don't have some silkies on the show.
Carey: 23:11
I don't have silkies.
Jennifer: 23:13
Sorry. So for my purposes, I have'em on wire because I'm working through the colors and breeding the colors. True. So I have a plan, I have a reason for doing what I'm doing now. For doing that. The birds really like to be monogamous. Like I do have one trio, but they've always been together. The rest of my breeders are monogamous, meaning one-on-one. I do have two group cages that are much bigger. But they all grew up to with each other, so there's not really a set ratio like there is with chickens or NICs. What I would recommend, if you're going to do a group. Mating situation. Group pen is if they all get along, then just leave them alone. If you are having issues with picking or fighting, or they're not laying, then sit down and just watch'em. Somebody's being a bully, so pull the bully, which is probably a dominant male. Pull him and then give it several days to regroup. And see if you have harmony. If you still don't have harmony, pull the next dominant male until, and you just keep doing that until you have harmony in your group mating.
Carey: 24:52
So you just get rid of the jerks
Jennifer: 24:54
basically. Okay. Usually when people message me, this is the problem, they haven't re gotten any eggs. See, the hen should be laying at eight to 10 weeks.
Carey: 25:07
Okay, so like a, when it comes to laying and that kind of stuff, they are like regular quail?
Jennifer: 25:12
Yes.
Carey: 25:14
Okay.
Jennifer: 25:15
And they still need the light. All of that other stuff is true. Like the other birds.
Carey: 25:20
Okay.
Jennifer: 25:20
But. Too many males or a jerk male can keep them from laying or if they're stressed, they're, they're feathers picking and that kinda stuff. Observation is really the biggest what's the word, the biggest tool in your toolbox with buttons. So just, and they're fun to watch. They're twitchy, they're really busy. Mine in the house will sing to me, talk to me, whistle back to me.
Carey: 25:51
That's cool.
Jennifer: 25:52
Yeah, it is. It's fun. We'll actually pause the TV and whistle to'em, talk to them and then they stretch up and look at us and, we just kind of mess with'em. So they're real interactive. They're more like like a parakeet versus necessarily quail as far as keeping them like pets. But I don't know if you let them loose, would they come back to their cage? I haven't let mine loose yet. Of course, Teddy's in the house and I think he would try to eat them, so we just leave them in the, in their cage, enclosure in the house. So anyway, observation is for Harmony is the best tool in your toolbox as far as I'm concerned. And then the adults, we developed a breeder feed that has really stepped up the nutrition on my adult birds. I was having trouble, they just didn't look right. I had'em on Gaer feed and I don't feed mine cheap feed anyway. But the game bird feed, it was sustaining life, but they didn't look right. They were dingy. They just didn't look healthy. And, and I wasn't getting great fertility and wasn't getting great survivability from the ones who did hatch. And so you and I discussed it and we worked on some breeder formulas and I started using that with about six months ago now.
Carey: 27:29
Probably somewhere around there. Yeah.
Jennifer: 27:30
Yeah. And I am up, I would say in the 90%. Hatch right now. And the birds, there's no bald spots on their backs anymore. Nobody's picking anymore. Now it, it is a mash, so it has all the seeds and all that, it looks like real food. And I wasn't sold on it when he first sent it to me or brought it up here. I, I, each one of my pens has two cage cups. There's two birds, so they have two cage cups. So I filled one cage cup with their old game bird layer feed and one with the new stuff. And I sent you a video that day. I remember that
Carey: 28:15
was when you sent me that video, I just died laughing.
Jennifer: 28:19
They were just devouring the new stuff. So they have never,
Carey: 28:25
They wanted to leave the other for the peasants.
Jennifer: 28:28
They've never had the other stuff since actually had bought a whole nother bag and it is still sitting there unopened. I don't, maybe he goats will like it. The pig will eat it.
Carey: 28:40
Pigs or goes, they'll love them. Oh,
Jennifer: 28:43
so I've totally switched them over. So a pair of buttons, those cage cups, I think hold four ounces and I fill them twice a week. So each bird eats about four ounces of feed a week.
Carey: 29:01
That's nothing.
Jennifer: 29:02
No, it's nothing. Yeah. They don't eat very much of it. Whereas the other ones, I was filling'em like three times a week and they didn't look good. So anyway, so I think we've got, I think you and I worked out the nutrition and I think that they're doing good now.
Carey: 29:23
So with your buttons like. I'm trying to get Bob Watts inside my house. I like the whistle
Jennifer: 29:32
Uhhuh.
Carey: 29:33
Now Tamara is warming up to the whistle. She actually likes it. She admitted that. We haven't gotten to the point where they're okay in the house. But, I might be close.
Jennifer: 29:43
If one just got loose in the house and you couldn't find it for a while, would that be okay?
Carey: 29:48
So I have contemplated bringing one of the males in because the only dog in the house is like a 12-year-old oodle. It is not chasing down a quail. I have thought about that, but I've also wondered if I would get in trouble. Yeah, I don't know. Speaking of houses and elaborate houses, I was on Facebook the other day and I saw one that looked like a cathedral
Jennifer: 30:17
for birds, and it was
Carey: 30:18
real like, it was really nice.
Jennifer: 30:24
Like for birds. An aviator? Yes,
Carey: 30:27
it was. It was a chicken coop.
Jennifer: 30:29
Oh, don't get me started on those.
Carey: 30:32
This thing is probably a 15,$20,000 chicken coop. It was nice.
Jennifer: 30:40
You gonna live in it, you might be living in one. If you put a bob light in the house, Tam gets mad.
Carey: 30:46
Okay. That'd be the only reason I'd get one of those suckers. Whew. But you know your farm, your rules,
Jennifer: 30:55
yep.
Carey: 30:57
Is there anything else that we have that we could tell folks about the buttons?
Jennifer: 31:02
Sexing them? Probably. How do you do that? So males have red feathers around their vents, tail between their legs. Somewhere on their body they have red feathers except for white birds. White birds are just solid white, so you have two sex. Them behaviorally would be the better way to do it, especially if you're inexperienced. Don't try to vent sex them.
Carey: 31:32
I don't, I don't recommend folks to try that out as a newbie. Because you squeeze just a little too hard and you got a big mess on your hands
Jennifer: 31:42
if you, that the bird won't
Carey: 31:44
recuperate from.
Jennifer: 31:45
If you are comfortable handling the birds, which you and I both are very comfortable handling birds and you could take one that you knew was a male, let's just say that you've got a wild type. And so he is got the red all over him and you know it's a male and you flip him over and you look at his vent. Then you could probably look at the whites and compare the two at that point now. Buttons are different than other birds because first of all, they're so small that you can literally squeeze them too hard and hurt them. They are game birds, which means when they are stressed, they let their feathers go and that could freak some people out. So just be aware that. When they're stressed, they'll let their feathers go. Just don't let go of them and they'll hurt themselves even more.
Carey: 32:42
That reminds me of the first time I processed a Turkey.
Jennifer: 32:49
When game birds are stressed, they let their feathers go. There's useful points to that.
Carey: 32:54
I was like, yeah, I understand now why people pluck these things.
Jennifer: 32:57
Yeah.
Carey: 32:58
I thought that'd take a lot, but.
Jennifer: 33:01
I just don't want it to freak people out. They get one, they pick it up, and then there's feathers all over the place, but that's what's going on. They just, they're stressed. They let their feathers go. And but white ones, you'll have to behaviorally sex. While I find that slightly annoying just because I'm on the, a bigger scale here the white ones are so pretty. They're just, they're like doves almost. They're really pretty to look at. Honestly, the silvers are my favorite. They're gray, silvery. Those are my favorite. They're very dainty looking. Their heads are very, I don't know, porcelain looking almost. The, those are my favorites. I have more silvers than anything else, just because I tend that way, but it's my farm and that's how I like it. But they still get pinkish red feathers around their vents in the silver, the gray color. The males too. Yep. It's just the white ones and you can put little tiny zip ties on'em. So I have some white ones with little tiny pink zip ties on her ankles. You gotta get the smallest ones and you probably need help because they're tiny. The zip ties are tiny and you have to cut that tab. But once you do sex em, I would mark them somehow so you don't have to keep doing it.
Carey: 34:30
Sure.
Jennifer: 34:32
But I think that's it. Other than that, it's just colors. If you, there's not a lot of books out there on button colors, but Gary Landry has a book you can buy on. His website has a lot of the colors in them. He was one of the original importers of the colors.
Carey: 34:50
Is, has he got anything coming up in February where he talks about'em?
Jennifer: 34:56
He might just become a nerd. He might be a nerd. Such a nice guy.
Carey: 35:05
Yeah, that
Jennifer: 35:06
I learned a lot from him. How about that?
Carey: 35:08
That's awesome. All right until next week. See y'all later.
Jennifer: 35:15
Yep.