Imagine my surprise last night when I went to give the quail a last good night at 9 p.m., and saw a little white speckled egg in the back left corner! I had only looked in on them an hour before, so it hadn't been sitting there very long. I excitedly called in Hubby, who reached in and took it from the layer (who it was, we don't know). It wasn't warm, practically room temp.
I had a plastic food container all ready for our trip to the quail farm, so I just grabbed it and placed the egg in there, and into the fridge. How exciting.
Then, just around 5:30 this morning, I packed Hubby's lunchbox, gave the angora bunny 2 carrots, and checked on the quail. Another egg! This one is brown speckled. Does that mean we have 2 different kinds of quail?
So... we know we have 2 females. It's quite possible we also have a male. However, there's one quail sitting on the hay who won't move. Is it possible she/he's sitting on an egg? I'll look again in a bit. If there's a 3rd egg now, then we have 3 females. If we go until late this afternoon before we see another egg, then it's just 2 females, which means we will have fertilized eggs!
I still need to get the brown egg out and put it in the fridge. I'll take a pic of the eggs then and post it here, probably under a new posting.
Quail are pretty quiet. I didn't hear them at all last night, and their cage is right in the next room. The skinny one does keep trying to fly straight up, which means s/he does bonk his head on the cage, but other than that, just lots of little peeps. A little scratching when adjusting their feet/claws on the wire floor.
We've decided to wait until we have about a dozen eggs, cook them, then let the rest sit in the cage and hope they'll be sat on and hatched.
Er, yes, I'm excited.
3 comments:
That is so awesome.
Maybe the farmer wanted a few but had to buy the huge pack from mcmurray hatchery , you can only get some of those wild game type birds in HUGE batches.
Quail eggs are so expensive @ the Asian grocery. Do you know if their daily setters of seasonal ?
We had some quail last year - they laid eggs all over the cage, and we picked them up and brought them in to cook. They are so different from chickens which like to lay in a particular place, usually in the same place each day - the quail just seemed to drop them where they took the urge! Don't hold out huge hopes of them sitting on the eggs as I understand that they are not good sitters and most quail are hatched in incubators. Sorry to squash that hope, but better to eat the eggs than leave them in the cage so long that they go bad.
Happy Hermit: From what I understand, quail lay eggs along the same time-line as chickens. As long as they have a substantial amount of daylight, they lay. The second one was dropped sometime during the night. I'm not sure if that's normal. Guess I'll find out!
Morgan: Both eggs "appeared" at the back left of the cage. Not in the hay. We'll keep a watch. We'll just experiment, and if the quail don't brood their eggs, once we get settled on the mini-farm, we'll get an incubator. I'd also heard that quail are horrible brooders.
Vikki
Post a Comment