Coturnix Quail

Description

Coturnix Quail are the newest addition to our sustainable homestead operation and let me tell you— we’re kicking ourselves for not keeping these sweet little powerhouse producers of lovely nutrition-packed egg-poppers full of B vitamins for the last decade.

Here’s what we love: Quail are quiet, with coos and trills similar to song birds. Quail require significantly smaller habitat than large fowl poultry to be healthy and happy. Most tolerate being handled and interacted with, if done so regularly. They lay daily if given appropriate nutrition (high protein, appropriate amino acids) and light (ours lay through the winter just with our cafe lights on a timer that hang across the driveway). And culls are surprisingly easy to process for the table, making them a full circle sustainable addition to your homestead plan. In our home, plain boiled quail eggs are the favorite snack of our young athlete, while the adult go-to snack is pickled quail eggs. For us, these tangy/spicy treats have really replaced our need for the starchy-salty mid-day snack attack and are serving up a great dose of daily vitamins and protein!

Some keep quail in large coveys in a ground aviary, and some keep them in small battery-style cages. We have raised cages similar to rabbit hutches that are large enough to build habitat in (found logs, hutches, baskets, and ash dust baths) while keeping them on a mainly wire bottom for their health and hygiene (and our sanity— quail produce a lot of poop and you’ll want to capture it all in your compost pile or soldier fly set-up).

We offer regular speckled eggs and celadon (blue) eggs in mixed plumages, our pens produce mixed feather patterns with fee, grau, and sparkly modifiers. Our lines are built from Thieving Otter Farm, Sadie Girl Farm, Southwest Gamebirds, and MyShire Farm stock.