Quail!!!

By -
On our way back from Enchanted Rock last Friday we picked up 14 quail chicks from a breeder in Dripping Springs.
14  1-2 week old Coturix quail. Coturix are predominantly brown but occasionally you'll get a white one. Texas A&M has bred an all white variety. 

They're pretty tiny but well on their way to getting their feathers

We put them directly into the quail tractor and quickly realized a fault in our design. The feeding holes are too big for young birds. A couple of over eager chicks crawled right into the food hopper and couldn't figure out how to get back out again.

After extricating the wayward chicks we taped up the feeding holes until we could come up with a better solution or the quail grew into them.

Quail moved into the tractor.

Testing out the watering system.

You fill up the blue coffee can with water. When the birds want to drink they tap the metal nipple and it dispenses a few drops of water.

Until the quail don't need a heat lamp anymore (5-7 weeks) we'll keep them on our balcony. I've installed the watering system but left the old water trough as a back up until the birds get used to using the watering nipples. I also rigged up a stand to hold the heat lamp.

I installed a small incandescent bulb (colored red with a marker) to provide a little warmth during the day. Our solution to the overlarge feeding holes was to cut small holes into small scraps of cardboard and pin the cardboard over the feeding holes.

Birds using the watering nipples.

We put some trays of dirt into the tractor that the quail seem to enjoy wallowing around in. 

Comments

Mom/sly said…
Are they still at your apartment? When are they moving to the burbs?
6 April 2017 at 08:37
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black Soldier Fly Larva Harvester

By -
Image
Black soldier fly larva are voracious decomposers. Here's a video  of a some larva completely devouring a hamburger over the course of five hours. And here's a video of some chickens completely devouring some black soldier fly larva. Black soldier flies have some curious qualities that make them particularly well suiting for cultivating their larva as fodder for your feathered friends: As stated before black soldier fly larva are voracious. They will eat fish and meat scraps that you would not typically put in your compost pile for fear of attracting larger vermin. They break down organic material into usable compost extremely rapidly. As an added bonus black soldier fly larva eat the eggs of other fly species who foolishly lay their eggs in rotting organic material. This severely diminishes your population of house flies and fruit flies. I had a compost pile that was beset with fruit flies until the black soldier fly larva moved in. When a black soldier fly larva is re
Read more

Roundwood Building Workshop

By -
Image
I went to a Roundwood Building Workshop this weekend. Roundwood is timber that is left as logs rather than being cut into planks. We constructed a shelter for a cob pizza oven (yet to be constructed). The timer is a mix of red cedar and ash juniper. Before doing anything with it we had to take the bark off it to prevent insect infestation down the road. The night before the project leaders charred the end of the posts that would be put in the ground. The charring is another insect infestation prevention measure. Getting the cut ends charred is of particular importance. The post holes were dug to a depth of 2-3'. We also half buried a couple of dozen roofing nails in the charred end of each post for additional stabilization. The cool thing about roundwood is that you can use features of the tree(like this limb) to add beauty and support. This limb will provide support for a girder. After we got the posts in position we back-filled the holes with decomposed g
Read more

Apartment Homesteading: Growing Sprouts in a Milk/Juice Carton

By -
Image
Materials: Empty Carton, Funnel, Scissors, dry beans No shed updates this week. Jean's parents will be visiting us soon. They'll be here for a few weeks so I wanted to leave enough for them to do to keep them out of trouble while Jean and I are at work. Instead of a shed update, here's the first article of I what I hope will be a fairly regular series I'm calling apartment homesteading. Subjects may include horticulture, food preservation, alcohol fermentation, animal husbandry, materials re-purposing, function stacking and whatever else we can come up with. All these activities will be extremely small scale, typically low overhead and low maintenance. A sprout is a germinated seed that has grown for 3-10 days. You might also call it a seedling.  Sprouts are tasty and healthy additions to salads, sandwiches and all kinds of cooked dishes. Some common sprouts are mung bean and alfalfa. If you do a google search for " health benefits of sprouts ," there
Read more