Good morning from Chicken Paradise — it’s me and Chako, under a blue sky. Today’s stars are the quail, who have been with us for a long time.
Four generations
These quail are the fourth generation of the line we’ve been breeding at home, and we now have a fifth generation at home, too. So cute. Will anyone come over to say hi? No. Food? They say they already ate. Personally, I find quail aren’t animals that get especially attached to people.
Quail colors
Our quail come from the Japanese quail, and many different colors have been developed from it. The most common, standard one is brown with spots on the chest. The one with darker brown markings is called Red Range. They panic a bit, so let’s be quick.
Last is the Texas A&M: white, with a little brown or black mark on top of the head. It was improved to grow big and is considered a meat quail, but it lays eggs just like the others. It’s named Texas A&M because Texas A&M University developed it. There are also other colors, like Tuxedo and Gold, that we don’t have. We also have a male we bought by accident mixed in with ours, and chicks like this one were born.
Groups 2 and 3
In Group 2, the male is from our own fourth-generation line, and the other four came from the man at the farm next door.
Group 3 is six jumbo quail I bought from an older man I heard about through a friend, who breeds quail. Jumbo quail have big bodies, so of course they’re famous for laying big eggs. Our neighbor wants to breed his quail with birds from a different group so the bloodline doesn’t get too close. So he’ll give us a new male, and we’ll give him females from a different group. The original plan was to hand over some females or chicks from our own line, but those are standard size, a little smaller, and we wanted to breed jumbo with jumbo. I really wanted a male, but the breeder was switching to white quail and giving up the brown ones. These females were the last he had.
By the way, most quail don’t sit on their own eggs, so I collect the eggs and hatch them in an incubator. It only takes about 16 to 17 days, which is really fast.
At the end of the day, it was time for everyone to go home. Thanks for meeting our quail troupe! See you tomorrow, Dolly, and see you in the next episode.