Happy Halloween and birthday. New babies are here!

The weather started to warm up from that harsh cold front just in time to have the doors and windows open on Halloween. This begins the time of year when I am thankful for where I live. The highs are in the mid to upper 80's for the next 7 days and it's perfect out. No panting or shivering animals anywhere. Although we do have 20 new babies that just hatched last night and this morning and would prefer it was closer to 100 degrees. Here they are, Happy Birthday and Halloween to our most recent batch of Coturnix quail babies. Most of these little guys will be sold to help pay for feed and other things I need around the tiny farm. This brings the total of birds hatched here in 2009 to 158.



We celebrated with a batch of pumpkin pancakes, made from a native pumpkin (Mayo Blusher Squash) I picked back in July and just now got around to cooking. MMmm pumpkin eating season has begun!

Quail pictures at one week

The chicks are a little over 2 weeks now, so I'm behind in the picture posting, I'll do another update in a few days to get you up to speed on their progress.
Out of the 85 that I hatched, I kept 17. One of those was a runt that I helped out of the shell (I know, never do that...it just looked so sad stuck in there), another has a funny bend in the back, nothing serious, I just don't want to breed it, and there's another one of the Jumbos that has weak legs. I have it and the runt in a separate brooder with some additional vitamins (really aimed at the weak leg one, the runt will likely never catch up in size, though it has as much pep as any of the others). These three "non-breeders" will stay separated, if they all turn out to be females, I'll just use them for eggs meant for the table rather than the incubator.




As you can see from the photos, the chicks went from the size of a quarter to the size of chicken chicks in one week!