Quail

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For years we pondered raising quail and in the late spring of this year we finally got them!  We just happened to run into a lady that was selling them at Tractor Supply and she was located just down the freeway in Alpine.  It’s funny how each type of animal we have just sort of landed in our path.  We had planned on getting each one eventually but God called it on the timing and it was always perfect.

The week after meeting this lady at Tractor Supply, we drove down to Alpine and picked up a straight run of 30 three week old Coturnix quail.  Coturnix are a Japanese quail so they don’t have the little plume on their heads like our California quail.  They were so cute and tiny!

We set them up in a nice little cage while Kris finished building their aviary.  Quail start laying eggs at 6 to 8 weeks old, as oppose to 6 months like chickens.  We were eager to start eating their eggs!  Once they started laying, the males also matured and started crowing.  If you’ve never heard a quail crow, it’s a very unique sound and nothing like a rooster.  It took me a while to get used to it.  With their maturing came mating.  When a male mounts a female, he grabs and pulls on her head feathers.  After a while, most of the females were going bald and some had open wounds.  So on went the males to freezer camp.  There are ways to sex a quail, but the easiest for us was to sit there and wait for a quail to crow, then separate him from the females.  We ended up with 16 males and 14 females.

The females are loving their aviary and are laying heavily.  What we love about raising quail is the fact they’re so easy to care for.  We feed them once a day and water every few days.  We gather eggs each day and it’s kinda fun because they don’t lay in a nest, they lay wherever they want and it’s always somewhere different.  Some staff kids like to come gather eggs for us, as well as hold and name the quail.

The aviary is just outside our bedroom window so at night we can hear the quail chirping.  It’s peaceful.  We can also hear the raccoons trying to find a way into the aviary, but it’s fully enclosed with wire fencing from top to underneath and locked up so they can’t get in.

Quail eggs are fun to eat because the whole thing fits on my fork and I can eat it in one bit.  All the flavor of egg white and yolk in one little nibble.  It’s like a tiny meal!  It takes about 4 quail eggs to equal 1 chicken egg, so I usually cook up several, but they cook very quickly so that’s convenient.  Other than that, they taste about the same as a chicken egg.  The difference in nutrition is quail eggs contain a higher amount of protein, vitamins A and B1, and fatty acids.

One other thing we like about the quail is they take up a smaller footprint and we don’t have to move them around like we do the chickens.  It’s great to let chickens free range in the fall and winter, but in the spring and summer we try to keep them out of the garden.  Chickens can be destructive and, from what we’ve read, quail won’t destroy plants like chickens will.