It’s so quiet in the office right now! Twenty-three healthy, growing quail chicks have been chirping, eating and pooping (mostly pooping) non-stop for the past week. Although their voices are music to my ears, I forgot how amazing quiet is.
Cleaning the brooder once per day wasn’t enough to keep up with the poop. I had to wash a couple of tiny quail feet last night, to get the dangleballs off of their toes. Literally, they had poop balls cemented on their toes. After realizing that the chicks are comfortably a week old, I switched them to pine shavings as bedding today. I’m really not keen on switching them to sand until they are older.
Most of the chicks are nestled into the pine, napping, and some are exploring it. They figured out how to get on top of the heat plates long ago, by quail standards, so I added some grippy shelf liner there to keep them from injuring their legs.
All of the twenty-three quail chicks from the latest hatch are healthy and growing. 
No more sliding around the tops of the heaters. Shelf liner to the rescue! 
The lighter ones sure have some interesting feathering!
The next change will be when I either divide the group of twenty-three into two or three pens, or figure out how to safely combine six giant plastic totes to form one quail home. I’d rather keep them all together, but we’ll see how everything goes with them, and with the other birds.
