Things I Wish I Knew Before Raising Coturnix Quails

After we finish a big milestone, it's important to always look back and see how we can improve for next time. The Coturnix Quails I raised were very cute, but that alone just won't cut the mustard. This video helps shed some light on what I learned raising these birds, so that hopefully you can make a more informed decision on whether you even want to raise them for yourselves.

Music Credit:
------------------------------------------------------------
Chill Beats by Faffo
------------------------------------------------------------

[chewy]

I have raised quail for many years. I raise them outdoors year round. I could raise 2 hundred and the neighbors would not know. They reach maturity in 8 weeks and can lay or be dressed. Dressing them is really easy. They tase great. There are many solutions for their eating habits ie spillage, very simple. They eat anything a chicken does or bought food. Watering is not really a problem. Easy to incubate. Can be sold to dog trainers, for food, or others to grow. Eggs are great to eat, pickle, or bake with or whatever. I use four quail egg to a large egg and the brownies or cakes taste great. And last, the poo is a fantastic fertilizer for adding to your gardens or plants and is free. It is milder than chicken poo and stronger than rabbit poo. Use carefully.

[SweetTea]

You forgot to mention that they are so cute!

[farmermarshall]

I'm going to raise quail next year. Their space requirements, quick growth, & minimal noise has me sold. Can't do chickens in many cities.

[joyguthrie]

You forgot to mention the 5-6 MONTHS you have to wait for chickens as opposed to quail the 6-8 WEEKS needed to wait for quail

[ymimad]

I raised quail in my apartment. I kept 4-5 breeding hens with 1 rooster, hatched out eggs in my incubator, and I had all the meat and eggs I could eat. the egg scissors work great. It wasnt fun killing them. I had to learn how to butcher and quick fry them. Finally though, even though I live alone, I just couldnt take the mess any more. and yes the food is a problem b ecause they must have turkey or gamebird feed. but all in all it was a fun experience for this old lady. My daughter just bought a house so when I go to live with her I may do it again.

[zizy]

1:40 it is because your feed is a dry commercial feed. Quails need to drink more water to help digestion. I occasionally feed them some scraps lettuce and notice they drink less water.

[joshjosh]

I loved raising my jumbo coturnix quail … built several cages with pull away poo trays to use for fertilizer ( works miracles in gardens) I kept 6 females with one male in each cage.. had more eggs than I could handle, kids loved them. Hatched some.. had all the quail meat I could ever need.. easy to clean .. takes less than a minute.. Easiest animal I’ve ever cared for.

[jakehvazdamusic]

I live in a small city. Not sure if I'm legally allowed but even if I was, I wouldn't have the space I want to keep chickens. So I have 12 quail that live in an enclosure I built a little bigger than the footprint of a twin mattress. Quail don't need free range like chickens, make little noise. Very low maintinence. Ans the scissors to open the quail eggs is a one time purchase of like 5 bucks. "If u had to buy something to use something else it's not worth it. " ok now apply that logic to ur whole life. I sell eggs and scissors along w much more at a local farmers market. They're a hit!

[mjrailey]

1) You can sell the fertile eggs for hatching with 3 or 4 hens to a male 2) Sell the eggs, pickled quail eggs are great! 3) Sell as breeding stock 4) Sell for meat! It can take a chicken 13-20 weeks until ready to harvest their meat vs 6-8 weeks for quail. Of course the chickens weight more and harder to harvest. Pro & cons to both!

[blackduckhomestead]

So let me get this straight, you'll buy quails/fertile eggs, feeders, waterers, bedding, cages, feed but when it comes to a $3 pair of scissors that's where you draw the line? If you're reading this comment please do not go off this video if you're considering quail.

If you want them to eat 100% of their food then make a proper feeder, a small plastic container to a 5gal bucket can be used from simple drilling holes in a container to more advanced set and forget PVC elbows in a 5 gallon bucket.

As for water there's small drinker bowls with a yellow nipple you can use and have as many or as little as you need hooked up to whatever size container you want, water stays clean and they don't spill any, I have a 30 litre container and have to fill it once a week when growing out a meat bird run and once every 3 weeks for my maintenance flock and I have my birds trained on the nipples within 2 weeks so they are using them successfully before they are even off the heat.

The eggs taste better as they have more yolk to white ratio and they are laying in 6 weeks and aren't nearly as hard to keep laying consistently as chickens.

The meat is better and easier to process at home than chickens, the males taste just as good as females unlike roosters which are far less tasty than hens and more tough. The video mentions that it feels wrong to raise quail just to eat but chickens lay eggs then you can eat them, you know that it's the same with quail right? What do you do with excess roosters? Unless you are buying hens/quail from a store which is pointless and expensive for meat anyway.

I have ducks, chickens and quail for meat/eggs, here's my honest review on the 3

Muscovy ducks: taste amazing, I mean so good, but they escape all the time unless you have a roof and males are dicks to the females, they're big and hard to process and messy! I recommend for advanced homesteaders who want the best meat.

Chickens: straight forward, dumb enough to keep in a pen with no roof, good for eggs as size of eggs is ideal and they lay well but for dual purpose they lack as roosters are tough and stringy no matter how fall off the bone tender you cook them, medium difficulty to process, easy to feed as there's heaps available and are walking Composters perfect to process food scraps.

Quail: best dual purpose, fast to breed/hatch/lay eggs/ butcher. Lay eggs well and taste better than chickens eggs. Everything wants to eat them so you need a good predator proof enclosure and they cannot be free ranged, eat some scraps like chickens but not as efficiently unless you have many. These guys are pretty aggressive and need to be kept in appropriate male/female ratios too. Best for co-housing with things like guinea pig and rabbits etc.

There's pros and cons to every animal but for a small homestead they can't be beaten for eggs and meat in small spaces.

[SLFYSH]

You could use a better feeder since they are so messy, it would help tremendously. Try a Tupperware type covered rectangle plastic dish, with holes cut in the side so they must place their heads inside to eat. -Almost no spillage.

[johnpaulkeller]

Things to address here:
1. Quail wasting food is going to happen unless you use a "quail proof feeder", this is something that I absolutely can not recommend enough. The reason they're wasting food is because it entertains them. I have no source for that, I have just been around them enough to know it's true.
2. You seriously won't buy quail egg scissors for your eggs? Seriously? You consider a tool that makes your job significantly easier a waste of money? That was like saying "If I have to buy a knife to cut my steak why buy the steak. If I can't just use my hands without my hands getting dirty it's a waste of time". Go to your feed store, or shop online, it costs like 5 dollars and you'll alleviate yourself of having to fiddle around with removing eggshell from the bowl permanently.

[MalluStyleMultiMedia]

Excellent video .. I’m thinking about raising some quails in a coop in my backyard. Since they are quieter, hopefully neighbors or association won’t complain.

[dylanhixenbaugh]

Crack your eggs on a FLAT surface, not sure why we assume we have to smack em on the edge of something. But it’s life changing when you start using flat surfaces to crack eggs, no shell fragments

[Gandalf-The-Green]

Quail are really great for keeping in a confined space, like a small aviary or a chicken tractor or a rabbit enclosure. Most chickens don't do well when they are totally confined and I don't like to see these active creatures so restricted in their movement. So quail are awesome for folks with a small yard or city folks with just a balcony. Weight wise they produce a lot of egg for their size and food intake, but require high protein food with a fine structure. If you have the space and are allowed to keep chickens, go with chickens. My bantam wyandottes are practically maintenance free, raise their own offspring, produce lots and lots of eggs and only get a few scoops of wheat and sunflower seeds here and there.

[usausa]

I raise quail pheasant and chickens. We raise chickens for eggs. Quail for meat and eggs. Pheasant for the same as quail. Quail are a very quick turnover. From hatch to laying is about 6-8 week. Pheasant and chickens is more like 5-6 months. If I had to only raise one it would be Quail. I can have thousands (which I have) and no one would even know. You can fit a lot in very little space. They are a must on the homestead in my opinion. Eggs are delicious and yes buy the tool to open them it's cheap. And Quail meat is excellent 👌

[TheShalomstead]

I experimented with raising quail at my last home. We lived in a 9k sqft mixed use building in the downtown area of our town. Our business was in one of the store fronts at street level and we lived in the giant apartment upstairs. We had an uninsulated sunroom at the back of the building that led out to a very large balcony that I kept them in. I built a three tier coop and raised up 50 baby quails. They were very fun but I ran into a few problems with my situation. I vastly underestimated the amount of manure these tiny birds produced. I had zero bare land to compost any of it and ended up filling up the feed bags with the manure I would scrape off the trays. The bags were so heavy that my municipal trash company would not take it. It was terrible hauling them up three flights of stairs. The smell would get out of control if I couldn’t find someone to take the manure and the flies were overbearing. I ended up selling the cage and quails to a local person who had the outdoor space to keep them. Now that I moved to another state and have 24 acres to work with we just put the money down on a nice sized coop from an Amish builder and reserved our chicks from a local hatchery to raise full sized chickens and a handful of guinea fowl. While the quail eggs were delicious, I found it kind of ridiculous to cut open 50+ tiny eggs just to feed my family. Just seems more appropriate to raise full sized birds for my family of 8. I’d definitely continue to recommend quails to smaller families or people who live in a suburban area with little space available to them.

[InaStanley]

In my experience raising quail, they will scratch around and eat what's on the ground just like chickens will. The difference is that humans have kind of bred a lot of the instincts that would be natural out of quail. Being kept on wire over generations and not having access to solid ground, hay, or something similar to scratch in is what I think has done this. So just like with learning where the food is, showing your quail that there's interesting and tasty stuff under their feet can help to reduce food waste. I kind of train my quail to eat from the ground by throwing out dried BSFL and crickets and scratching around in the area with my fingers. They seem to get the message pretty quickly, and if they have times where they've almost emptied their feeders, they will start to clean up the feed they'd previously scratched out of the feeder. I now use scratch-proof feeders, so there's a LOT less waste, but I still throw out bugs and little microgreen scraps and such to them, and they eat from the ground without any issues.

As far as their eggs, I eat them, and they're also a part of our pets' raw diets. I don't really have an issue with them being super brittle. That kind of sounds like low calcium. Between free-choice crushed oyster shells and BSFL, my quail get plenty of calcium. I just tap them or cut them open with a light butter knife if I need to crack them open. I also have a little egg boiler for them because they're perfect in salads!

They're very easy to keep when in a decent coop on the ground, using the deep litter method, no-drip waterers, and scratch-proof feeders. Fairly quiet, although their noise blends in with natural bird sounds. Not stinky if you're working the deep litter method appropriately and composting old cleaned out litter. And fairly friendly if you handle them and spend time with them regularly. Free-ranging is a no-go, but they can be kept in a moveable coop with no bottom so they always have access to fresh grass (as long as the area the coop is in is well protected from predators). To me, they're a joy to keep and can have little personalities very much like chickens!

[ardaarsen]

A friend of mine had Quails as side project in his farm. They eat and poop alot for their size :) They indeed reach maturity within a month. Male croak is definitely NOT for indoors. Neighbours definitely wont think it as a random wild bird! Quails shed alot and the sand bath thing gets really messy, if your setup is like 2x1x1 cage thats a red flag . When it comes to eating habits quail chicks do not learn as fast as chicken chicks. My friend ended up hand-feeding some of them which never really was the case with chickens.

[SirNC]

I just got quail (already have chickens) and love them. I appreciate this video your video is helpful and entertaining.