Tails About Quails Continued

The end game for these birds was always there, waiting. I knew it would come. I found other things to do–I cleaned out all the quail pens, moved birds around. I made a fancy quail cage to help with moving them so they didn’t fly away.

That’s beautiful, isn’t it? I made it up right out of my head, using scrap wood for the handles and little door at the top. It even has a catch pan to sit on so I could take them in the car if needed, for instance, if I wanted to sell them at an auction.

But these birds were destined to be sold packaged, not live.

Aren’t those gorgeous? Downright professional. I did all that myself–designed the labels, packaged and repackaged them in shrink bags until I got it just right. Two little birds per bag, each one just over a quarter pound.

But before I could package them up so prettily, they had to go from live bird to meat.

Ay, there’s the rub! To be or not to be. Or to enter into a different state of being? State of purpose?

My purpose was to change the state of these little birds with as little trauma as possible. To them, and to me.

When I couldn’t procrastinate any longer, I picked up my Cutco kitchen shears and headed out to the farm. I caught an even dozen quail and put them in my hand crafted quail holding pen.

When we had butchered quail before, Jacob got the job of actually killing them. But now he was at school, and Bruce was driving school kids around on his bus route. It was up to me.

I set up in the garage. I turned on NPR. I set out two buckets, one to catch their little heads, and the other to put them in when they were dead. And this part was really awful, there’s no way around it. It was my first time to deliberately end a life. Even accidentally hitting a rabbit or bird while driving makes my feet hurt in a weird way. How was I ever going to do this.

I held a fat bird upside down in the bucket, positioned the scissors, closed my eyes. Closed the shears. I expected the bird to flail as it died. But I didn’t expect it to vibrate. For a full half minute, the quail vibrated like an old fashioned alarm clock winding down, just without the noise. Only the radio filled the silence.

My uncle in Indiana is a hunter. An upper room is dedicated to the animals he’s taken, mostly with a bow. There are a number of black bears in various color stages, elk, caribou, lots of white-tailed deer, and a water buffalo he shot in Australia. Uncle Gil is full of hunting stories, many spiritual and profound. He is always reverent when he tells the stories, and he says taking a life is one of the most profound things he has experienced. Every time.

Now for the first time I sort of understand what he means. In those 30 seconds, each quail went through a transformation right there in my hand. They went from being living creatures that I had cared for, fed and sheltered to being food that would nourish other creatures. It’s not quite the same as killing a wild animal that you track and shoot, but it’s a similar act of purposely and reverently taking a life.

So now I had a bucket of little bird bodies to process into packages for sale. This was meat now, and I knew what to do with it.

Well, I take that back. I was still a novice at scalding and plucking such tiny carcass, and no matter how careful I was, I tore the skin on almost half of them. Maybe I had the scalding water too hot? One of them I gave up on and skinned completely (lower left). Can’t sell those.

I separated out the heart and livers (those are the red glumpy parts in the photo), and even cleaned a few of the tiny gizzards. The gizzards peel much more easily than a chicken’s and if breaded and fried I bet would make a tasty little morsel.

I’m not happy with my quail dressing success rate. I got six usable birds out of the 12 I killed. I have to figure out a better way to pluck them without tearing their delicate skin.

I have lots more birds to practice on, like the ones below that we hatched out at home.

I hope I never get used to it.