How To Care For Quail
- Thomas Nelson
- April 4, 2020
- Animals, Sustainable Living
- 0 Comments
If you’ve decided to try out keeping quail for meat and eggs and you’ve settled on which type of quail to raise, you’ve taken the first steps on an exciting journey! But quail are live beings that need your respect and care. Read our guide on how to care for quail.
Quail housing
Quail handle confinement well. They don’t free range like chickens do. Free range quail are gone quail. Adults are small enough to fit through the gaps in a standard chain-link fence, so fencing with smaller openings is needed. Some kind of confinement will be needed to prevent them from wandering off.
Quail typically need at least 1 square foot of floor space in a pen to be happy and healthy, but the larger your pen, the more you house. I wouldn’t suggest more than 4 quail in a 4 square foot foot space. But you can probably keep 80 quail in a 50 square foot space.
They can survive being cramped, but it could cause added stress and there’s probably an argument that it’s inhumane to cram them into a small space. Stress means your quail won’t live as long or lay as much.
In smaller numbers, quail can live indoors in a rabbit cage or outdoors in a rabbit hutch. They can handle wire floors, which has the benefit of keeping them away from their droppings, but they prefer having direct access to substrate like sand or pine shavings.
Having some soil or sand available will help keep them healthy, as dirt baths are needed for proper grooming. If kept indoors, frequent cleanings will be a must, as with any indoor pet.
Reaching maturity
Quail hens begin laying eggs at 5-7 weeks old. They grow to near their full size at 12 weeks, which is usually 9-13 ounces. In her ~2.5 year lifespan, a hen will lay around 450 eggs if given a light source during winter months and fed a healthy diet that includes greens and bugs on top of a good organic gamebird feed.
Their laying cycle is one egg every 23-28 hours. Quail, like chickens, need 12-14 hours of light in order to lay eggs. Quail roosters do crow, but it is significantly quieter than a chicken’s and easy to mistake for a wild bird’s call. This is a good video demonstrating the coturnix quail call.
