Look at all those…CHICKENS!

By “chickens” I mean birds in general. Of which we have many right now. Of multiple species and varieties–turkey, chicken, and quail. One hundred and eighty-three individuals, if I counted correctly. And 72 quail eggs in the incubator that are hatching out as I write!

But mostly, this is going to be about the quail. We’re hoping to raise quail for meat as well as eggs, and as I’m learning about them I realized that the variety we have currently are better for eggs than for meat. The quail we started out with are Celadon, a variety of Coturnix quail. They carry a gene that makes the eggs a light robin-egg blue. Between 60 and 70% of our eggs are blue and the rest are brown speckled with blue on the inside of the eggshell. If you hard boil the eggs and peel them, you can see the blue inside.

By the way, peeling quail eggs is optional–at a recent family reunion, a few of us tried just popping them in our mouths and chewing away. Crunchy and delicious, with extra calcium! I think I’ll try boiling them in really salty water next time. Then when they’re eaten shells and all, they would be nice and salty. Kind of like chewing up roasted and salted sunflower seeds with the shells left on.

The problem with the blue-egg birds is that they are pretty small. I discovered another variety of quail called Jumbo. They can top off the scales at a whopping half a pound! Since we want to market quail for meat, I thought I should get some of those, too. Last week I drove to Purcellville in Northern Virginia and bought 54 Jumbo quail. In the scale of our small farm right now, that’s a LOT of quail. They fit neatly into two boxes in the back seat. Twelve of them (2 males and 10 females) are 8 weeks old and will be breeder birds for the new variety, and the other 32 will be–sigh–birds for slaughter.

I’ve written about the dilemma of eating the animals you raise before, and am no more settled about it now than I was then. I had to kill several of the Celadon males to make room for the newcomers. We’ll eat them tonight.

I’m going to briefly discuss the process of slaughtering and processing quail, so if you are a vegan or a vegetarian or a sensitive reader or otherwise not interested in butchering, you can–and should–bail out now!

Technically speaking, quail are very easy to kill. You snip their heads off over a utility sink with a pair of kitchen shears. Emotionally speaking, they are no easier to kill than any other meat animal, and I can’t bring myself to do it. I stood over the sink with plump quail in one hand and shears in other other and had to ask my 17 year old son to do it for me. Or my husband. Neither is a stranger to butchering fowl, which we did regularly in Ethiopia.

After the birds are dead, I can take it from there. Dunk the quail in simmering water for 10-20 seconds, and the feathers slide off under your thumb.

Once the feathers are off, I spatchcock them–take the shears and cut alongside the backbone on either side, and cut around the tail and vent. The neck and backbone come away with all the guts intact, easy as pie.

At a quarter pound, that makes a nice little appetizer.

Cooked, of course!

By way of a taste test, I bought six commercial quail from our international grocery store and will cook them side by side and see if there’s any difference in taste or texture quality. We have 11 birds in total and I will cook five and my neighbor, who just happens to be a chef and restaurateur, will cook six. Check back for the results!

Two other poultry-heavy things happened today.

A month ago we bought 50 turkeys to have ready for Thanksgiving. We thought that might not be enough, so today Bruce brought home 30 more day-old peeps. The first batch of birds we brooded in a big wooden box in our garage in town; this time we took the whole shebang out to the farm.

And the other thing?

Remember the 72 quail eggs that we set up in a brand new incubator two weeks ago? Right on schedule, they started cracking open and spilling out quail babies at 7 this morning!

This was the first bedraggled little one to hatch. I’m absolutely beside myself about these little guys and can hardly tear myself away from the incubator to get anything else done. I have a bet with my brother-in-law about how many will hatch. He guessed 40. So if less than 40 hatch, I owe him a dollar per unhatched bird. For everyone ever 40, he gives me a dollar. So far, we’re at 10, but it’s kind of hard to count since they all squish together.

I separated the eggs according to size and color, and want to see if big eggs hatch out bigger chicks, and if different colored eggs hatch out different colored chicks. So far, my hypothesis seems to be correct–one of the dark brown spotted big eggs just hatched, and the chick is brown and golden striped. The chicks from the blue eggs are darker. The little brown eggs are hatching out very TINY chicks with gold and brown striped heads and brown bodies. Will the chicks keep their size differentiation when they are bigger?

I’m not allowed to open the incubator for 24 hours, and taking photos through the plexiglass is not ideal. The chick on the left came out of the Big Blue Egg pile, and the one on the right out of the Big Brown Speckled pile. The one at the top is out of the Small Blue Egg pile–or at least I think so, but those chicks can move into each other’s territory and have even pushed their eggs across the barrier between groups. Not so into forced segregation.

I’ll post more photos tomorrow when I move them over to the brooder trough. Between now and then, I need to build a screen lid to put over the brooder so they don’t fly away!

Until then, Paka our cat keep an eye on things.