Beginning to raise few quail. Bought 35 3wk old A&M birds and 4 laying A&M hens and a rooster. Besides good eating I been wanting to make some methane makers. These little rascals can eat some feed in a hurry. anyone else raising quail?

No. But I want to! Back in the 70’s. We had wild quail. Now, I haven’t even heard one! Man! They are fun to shoot and good eating!!

We raise quail and pheasant. Eric

I started to last summer/fall. Birds were too stupid to lay! Actually the dozen birds laid a total of about 10 eggs over the period of a week or two.

Tasty birds, though.

I've looked into it. It seems you can buy a chick for the same price as an egg. I'd probly end up with pets and wouldn't want to kill them. I'd like to get a population going but they don't seem to go wild very easily. Too many predator birds.

There are many on here with much more experience than I.
I had jumbo brown couterix for a few years.
Great egg layers, easy to identify male from female.
If you want only eggs, separate the sexes at about 5 weeks and butcher the males.
Around 6 weeks, the aggressive ones will show their stripes, cull them.
If you are breeding them, one male for every 5 or 6 females is plenty.
Even at this ratio, they will pluck the hens bald.

The plantation managers wife hatched some this past summer and we used them for dog training only. All wings are clipped prior to training. He’s adamant about NO release birds getting away into our wild bird population.
Not sure what incubator she used but it was pretty cool checking on them and watching them hatch.

Can a domestic ever survive in the wild? About 30 years ago hunted a preserve where wild and domestic quail lived. The wild quail formed coveys of about 8-10 birds. The pen raised birds did not. Off course the wild birds were more wild and flew faster when flushed.

Often wondered if the domestic birds survived a year.

I raise 50,000 to 60,000 quail a year, mostly coturnix, button quail and often bobwhite. I've raised Gambles, Valley and Blue Scale quail too.

Keith

We worry about any diseases they could potentially introduce to the wild birds. Forgot to clarify, the quail were used for training our wagon dogs. They aren’t getting away even if they wanted to.
When training pointers we go to other properties to release for the pointers.
I haven’t seen any pen raised birds survive more than a week in the wild. I’m sure some somewhere have had luck, but even going back a day or two later with a trap and caller to try and get some back we haven’t had much luck.
It’s so amusing to have clients come in after hunting a release bird establishment and that first wild covey rises. One ole boy looked at us and said I didn’t even have time to click my safety off. I guess release birds get up individually sometimes because they kept thinking there would be more quail to get up after the covey flew off. A quick learning experience for most of them though. These guys come in with guns that cost more than my house did!!

The O.P. reffered to A&M quail and I mentioned coturnix.
Neither of those can be seriously equated to anything that could be expected to survive as a wild, self sustained population.

A&M quail are just a variety of coturnix quail. The species name is Coturnix coturnix. With the colors, modifiers and patterning genes you can produce about 60 different color looking coturnix.

Keith

Keith are those the ones that have a very unique call? I believe that’s what the managers wife hatched. A lot different sounding than a Bobwhite for sure.

The male coturnix have a sort of pipsquak sounding, slightly growling crow. The female coturnix sound like crickets. The Japanese though the hens were lucky, because of their sound and carried them in ivory cages, on their belts, when going into battle.

I like the sound of the Gambles quail the best of the quail I've raised.

Keith

Yeah...that’s about a good explanation of the sound as I could imagine. Definitely wasn’t “native” to South Georgia sounds, lol.

I understand that.
At least the brown are easy to distinguish between sexes.
Those A&M are all white unless I am mistaken, and I am unwilling to spend the time to observe them to distinguish which are the aggressive jerks.

I have a few people a year, who hear the coturnix when they come out, who think I have a barn full of raccoons. To me coturnix don't sound like raccoons at all.

Keith

I suppose that one could mistake the racket coturnix roo's for coons, but they don't sound off until the coons have gone to bed for the day.

Coturnix are very easy to vent sex once they are mature. The males have a foam ball on the tail side of the vent. The foam looks like shaving cream and feeds the sperm in the female for up to 2 weeks after mating. The foam expresses easy, with light pressure and makes a fair sized bulge.

Adult females have a very wide vent, once they start laying. If the female has been bred, she will have a small amount of foam, laying flat, in the stomach side of the vent.

Overall, females have a longer, more horizontal cast. After handling hundreds of thousands of coturnix, I can tell full adult females from males, just by how they feel in my hand. Females are typically 1 1/2 to 2 ounces heavier than males of the same strain.

Females with tight, puckered vents, are not laying.

Males with small or very large, solid filled foam balls are not breeding. The best males will have a medium size, softer foam ball.

I sort, select and cull a huge amount of coturnix quail.

Keith

When I lived in the Ecuadorian Amazon I stayed for a month with an old retired US Navy flier who was quite a handy man. He had caged chickens and had a system to take the manure and some chopped up straw which he placed in a barrel and added water. He then put a round piece of solid styrofoam and plywood on the water and when the methane gas raised it up to a certain level it tripped a switch to a repurposed refrigerator condenser which pumped the methane into a tank. The methane tank was the fuel that boiled the water for his coffee every morning. As I recall, this ol' guy lived on coffee and home rolled cigarettes so he pretty much was set.