A great (and also sad) quail hatch!

I went to bed with one quail just barely hatched and this is what I woke up to:
In the incubator!

These are from shipped eggs from a flock completely unrelated to mine so I can refresh the gene pool. The eggs these guys came from arrived on a particularly hot day and sat in the mail truck touring the neighborhood for at least 5 hours. Needless to say I was worried about their viability but was pleasantly surprised when 98 hatched out of 118 set. :)

Unfortunately one of the last quail to hatch had an umbilical hernia. About an inch of intestine was protruding from the little guys belly button. This is the first time I've ever seen this in person and sadly this situation doesn't have a good prognosis so I had to cull the bird. Now I've eaten some of my quail before, but their death served a purpose. It was much more difficult to kill a tiny bird, only to bury it in the garden. One of the hard moments in raising livestock.

On a brighter note-- here are a few of the 92 smiling faces from the hatch.

Time to refresh the coturnix quail!

Well, it's that time of year again. Once a year I like to bring in some quail eggs from a new source to refresh the bloodlines. No one wants a bunch of inbreeding! I'll sell some of the adults I currently have and replace them with birds that hatch out of these:




Out of 120 eggs shipped only 2 got cracked. It always amazes me how well eggs (and even chicks) do in the mail. I probably crack 2 quail eggs a week just bringing them from the quail pens into the house.

I will be keeping a total of only about two dozen birds, the rest will be sold or eaten. I currently have about three dozen, so those plus whatever I get out of this hatch will be the birds to choose from. I decide which birds go where by a few different criteria:

1. Genetics: I want to have as many different bloodlines represented, I especially want the roosters to be from different bloodlines as the hens as much as possible.
2. Defects: Any bird that has any trait that I wouldn't want to breed (for example I have one chick right now with crossbeak) gets eaten. It's unfortunate, but it's important to not have those birds in the breeding pool, mine or anyone elses. They are given a good life until they are table size.
3. Interesting, good looking or other positive qualities: I have a few that I recently hatched out with color patterns I haven't seen before, I'll keep at least one of those. I also have a rooster that I love because he has a bizarre and warbly crow very different from the others. I also have a few birds that are especially friendly and/or lay very large eggs, they stay here as well.

Ideally, all of the other birds get sold or bartered with. I wouldn't want to sell a bird that I wouldn't use for breeding myself, I feel that even as a tiny scale hobby farmer I have a responsibility to not muck up the genetic pool for this amazing breed. (And no one wants bad quail karma!)

Solar update, more baby quail, PICS

For those of you that are curious, the electric bill last month was $9.47. Way to go, solar! About $8 of that is administrative fees and taxes, the remainder is from the couple of days before they installed the new meter that credits us with surplus power. After all the math, it seems like it will pay for itself in about 5 years. However my husband and myself are both essentially freelance so the investment in the piece of mind that we have (basically) one less bill to pay every month is worth even more to us.

We had an 80% hatch rate for this last batch of quail. This seems a little low for eggs that didn't have to travel but still very much acceptable. There comes a hard time in nearly every hatch when a quail or two has started pipping out of the shell and for whatever reason gets stuck and doesn't progress. The general rule is to not help the quail, that hatching is a test of fitness and for the sake of future generations you only want to breed the best and healthiest birds. Often birds you help out will be weak or have other problems and die anyway. Every once in awhile though you get a bird that is so close, really seems determined and peeps away at you from half inside the shell as if to beg you for just a tiny bit of help. Honestly from time to time I help one of these birds, I tell myself I really shouldn't, but I can't just let it suffer. An important part of responsible animal husbandry is to not be such a softy, that you really aren't doing the breed as a whole any favors by helping out individuals in this situation. My solution for this is that if there is one that I've helped, to band it and make sure it doesn't get used for breeding.


It takes about 4 to weigh as much as a cherry tomato. :) On to the pics!






Breed responsibly!

Been awhile! Birds in the heat.

Sorry for my lack of posts. Here's a synopsis of what has been happening at the oven usually known as the Tiny Farm.

It's been ridiculously hot here. This whole week the high is around 115 and the lows are in the low 90's. This means that the birds never get a break. The muscovies were being real troopers until today when they finally started panting and just hanging out next to the water dish in the shade all day and completely giving up on chasing me around, which seems to be their favorite thing to do. I don't know why they don't just get in the water.
The chickens are far less heat tolerant than the ducks and are really miserable. Every morning around 5:30 am (when it's a brisk 94 degrees) I give the birds some cool vegetables (lettuce, melon, cucumbers etc) to get them hydrated and cooled off. The sprinklers come on around 6:30 and get the area under their favorite bushes nice and wet. Around 9:30-10:30 when the temps get to around 105, I put frozen water bottles with no lids, in shallow pans under their bushes so they can drink the cool water or stand in it if they want to. I replace the frozen water bottles around 3 or 3:30 when the temps are about 115 and hose off the bushes they hang out under to make sure it stays damp under there for them. Once they go up to roost at night I hose their feet/roosting bar off, which they don't particularly enjoy, but I think it helps them.

The quail get their water from one regular water bottle and one that was frozen the night before so as it melts it makes nice cool water (until of course it heats up into unpleasant warm water). Instead of filling their dust bathing dish with sand, I fill it with ice a couple of times a day. Like the chickens, they stand in it and drink the cool water. I also put a few ice cubes on some heavy cotton fabric in the cages so it keeps the fabric cool as the ice melts.

As you can see keeping birds in the desert, especially the chickens and non-native quail can be a big pain, luckily it's only this much work when the temps are consistently over 110 for several days in a row. Which is hopefully less than three weeks a year. Even with the extra steps each chicken is laying an average of only one egg a week. (Interestingly, the quail are still laying around 5 each a week.) I know lots of people that don't take quite as many extra measures, but I feel like it's my resposibility to do what I can to make them comfortable since I'm responsible for bringing them to Phoenix.

I also have about 100 coturnix eggs in the incubator due to hatch around July 27th! This will be my first batch of quail eggs to hatch from my own birds, I'm interested to see what kind of hatch rate I get.