Two in the Bush, Part II

Make that 72. Not in a bush, in an actual incubator that I bought at the Rockingham Co-op. I’m going to try to hatch out these little blue gems and raise my own baby quail! Quails!

I’ve had quail (or quails) for not quite two months now. They give me six to eight delicate blue eggs a day. I just love these little birds. They are pretty quiet and calm as far as poultry go, but the roosters do crow–they stand up really tall and make a little trill. It’s so cute. And they don’t come after me and try to cut up my legs with their spurs like the rooster does at the farm! These birds aren’t at the farm, they’re in our garage.

The peeping you hear in the background is from the turkeys who are now in the brooding box. The two species are socially distanced from each other because quail can get diseases from chickens and turkeys even if the host birds show no signs of illness. We keep the garage door open for ventilation, and needless to say, the car stays outside.

So the another cool thing about these little birds is that I got to design and build a quail pen for them. And this is what I love about being a farmer. We get up in the morning and say, “What do we need to do today?” And Bruce says something like, “I need to build a fence,” or “I need to lay an electric line underground.” And I’ll say something like, “I need to build a quail pen.” Then we go do that.

The neatest thing about this pen is that I didn’t have to buy any lumber to build it. If you’ve been to Lowes, Monger’s, or Martin’s Native Lumber recently, you are well aware that you don’t want to buy any wood now if you can possibly avoid it. I could put together an eight-foot-long, two-story, four-section cage from miscellaneous pieces stored in our shop. Mostly ancient 2×4’s salvaged from an old shed we tore down about 10 years ago. The result is that the cage is enormously heavy and rather overbuilt!

I was really torn between having the quail on the ground in a moveable cage that I could place in the tall brome grasses at the farm, and having them in pens in the garage where I could check on them several times a day and put the eggs in the house right away. I chose to keep the birds close to home.

Most people who keep quail in cages have them sit on wire and collect their droppings in a pan underneath. I didn’t like the idea of having the quail live on wire and I thought it would be a stinky set up.

Nothing stinks quite like poultry poop. Chicken shit. Duck dooky. Turkey turds. Goose guano. To keep down the odor, you want to have a lot of carbon material to neutralize the nitrogen in the droppings. In Ethiopia, I kept our hens in a deep-litter system, with about a foot of pine shavings on the floor.

The chickens scratched and dug in the shavings and mixed up their manure so thoroughly, it didn’t smell at all. We cleaned it out once or twice a year, put it in the compost pile, and a few months later, ta-da! Well-nourished coffee trees.

So I decided on a solid bottom and a bed of cedar shavings or straw for manure management. I built the bottom two boxes first, with doors that opened from the front and swung down. Quail don’t nest in boxes, but just lay their eggs randomly any old place.

It was crazy hot (Virginia summers have their own 4-H club–hazy, hot, humid, and hellish) so I put a shallow dish in each cage with some water for them to splash in.

The quail love their shavings, and scratch them out all over the floor. For the second layer, I built a deeper threshold using a 2×4 to try to contain the shavings a bit better.

You can see I should have put the railing on the outside of the 2×4 rather than on top so I could screw the pieces together better. I made a lot of mistakes, and the final product is almost too heavy to lift into the truck bed, but hey, I’m learning!

Tomorrow I’m fitting the doors so they lift from the top–a bit easier to get in there and take out the eggs.

Stay tuned for the photo of the final design.

And to find out how many of the eggs hatch out!

Bonus photo. (Thanks for reading all the way to the end!) More about Building Things.

When we were building the pen for our hens in Addis Ababa, this leopard tortoise would sneak up and try to attack us. We had to lift him onto an old stump where he was stuck up in the air waving his legs around so he couldn’t lunge into our ankles. Seriously, he was a menace. He hated the noise of the hammer and would stealthily sneak up on you–if a 100 pound tortoise can be stealthy–raise himself up on his legs as tall as he could get, and then wham he’d launch his shell at your shins with all his weight behind the impact. Yortis the Tortoise, Master of Menace.