I’ve decided that I probably don’t want to keep chickens because I can’t have a rooster (they’re not allowed in my city), which means I couldn’t maintain a population over generations.
Ducks are out because they need lots of fresh water every day. That would be irresponsible water use in my desert climate. I’m trying to be really careful with water. I’m trying to use only greywater and stored rainwater for my plants.
Quails seem like a possibility. They’re quiet, they don’t need a lot of water (in fact, I read online they don’t need any as long as they’re eating plants that have enough water in them), and we have wild quails running around our city. Clearly they can feed themselves just fine in this ecosystem.
What’s it like to having a laying flock of quail?
Are they destructive to gardens, like chickens are?
Could I let them free-range around my garden eating bugs?
Can they eat bindweed? How much growing space would it take to feed each bird without purchased feed?
I’m thinking I could give them extra insects by sticking a bug zapper outside and emptying the contents into their pen every day. I saw the idea in a YouTube video about raising chickens, and it seemed pretty brilliant.
The subject of quail was brought up in this thread, but I think the thread moved on without really talking about them in detail.
The Cortunix Quail are the one that provides the eggs so I will be referring to them.
the males make a call while not as loud as a chicken, I would not consider them to be quiet, Females didn’t seem to make any noise.
I would not recommend free ranging them as they seem to have lost most of their natural instincts, as the context of their domestication is different from chickens, they have always been raised as a cage birds. they lack almost exclusively lack the instincts to go broody and lack the behavior to go back to a set location. I have seen one English lady in France with a pair of extremely tame quail that would free range, but that’s the only evidence I’ve seen of them free ranging and the effort needed to produce those results is probably more than the value the quail add in a food sense.
maybe you could try selecting for traits that make the more adept at caring for themselves, but that is a bigger project with probably quite a few generations to get the characteristics that you are hoping for.
They fly well so a roof is a must.
them getting spooked is a problem and the can break their necks if they hit a top;
so you have two choices you either go with like a walk-in run or aviary so if a bird gets spooked it doesn’t hit anything too hard or you have a cage below a certain height requirement so that the birds know that there is a roof so they wont fly.
Another thing to add is that the males are really brutal to the females, so the male-to-female ratio is very important, I don’t know how comfortable you are with slaughtering your own animals, but its essential for quail so you don’t have males murdering your females. at least slaughter with quail is really easy physically maybe not mentally at least for me.
I second the comments above. I kept conturnix in solid floor rabbit hutches for several years. They lay at six weeks and will stop laying when the daylight drops below 12hrs. Quail are quite short lived, so you might want to invest in a brooder ( though you need fertilised eggs)
They need special feed and will be quite happy on grass, best move them daily and make sure they can’t stick their head through the fence. No need for a nest nor roost. I learned most from backyard chickens forum.
They were fun but chickens are way easier ( and eat all your kitchen scraps too)
I heard about quail from another quail raiser, Kat Lavers, who owns the 1/14th acre urban homestead known as the Plummery in Melbourne. While not well-read on the subject, I had not heard of noise from males nor male aggressiveness before. She may be raising only females.
My wife is very fond of the idea of keeping chickens or ducks so I’m not sure quail will make the list for us. But I remember quail and guinea hens as having some advantageous tradeoffs with the ol go-to chickens. There’s probably some permies threads that walk through some of the tradeoffs in detail.
Comfortable with killing animals? Nope, because I’ve never done it before, and I’m squeamish at the idea.
Willing to learn to get over that squeamishness? Yes, absolutely.
I think it’s morally okay to eat meat, and I think it’s better for an omnivore to take personal responsibility for the unpleasant aspects of getting meat to eat, and not just foist them off on somebody else. Especially if it means being able to ensure the animal lives a good, happy life beforehand.
I’ve seen chicken tractors. Would a quail tractor be feasible? I really like the idea of being able to move them around, so they can provide weeding-eating, bug-eating, and fertilization services throughout my whole yard.
I feel exactly the same way, I want to provide a better life for the animals I consume along with providing higher quality meat, I’ve only done it once and it was mentally hard for me to do.
We love our chickens. Even though you cant keep a rooster, someone close by could barter and trade chickens with you each season as you need them to supplement your flock numbers. Chickens have provided the energy to completely turn an entire compost pile several yards in size, they go after the insects and always scratch daily. Our landrace flock is nearly 30 varieties mixed and they lay great eggs and tolerate the high summer Yuma, AZ temperatures better than hatchery chickens. They also keep scorpions, snakes and any other insrct at bay on our small farm. Even though we are on 5 acres, its not all watered so the chickens range where the water has been applied and the ground is damp. The ducks get baby pools , the smaller ones, of fresh water twice daily. The duck poop water is dumped onto the wood chip piles and help the compost process continue even when its hot and dry weather. Our piles are truckloads of chipped landscaping waste that otherwise went to the landfill.
Any barnyard fowl that you can keep on your space is benificial. They may not eat a particular weed, but may surely scratch and turn the compost pile for you. The manures can also get composted or make tea that is less concentrated to amend your garden.
What food are you planning to grow for them? I’d be particularly interested in learning from you how much space you end up needing to devote to growing food per bird. I have a small growing space, and if I ever keep livestock, I’d want to grow all their food for them, so a rough estimate of space required would be valuable to know.
