The dust in my office from raising thirty quail chicks to adolescence has been a constant snowstorm. To be fair, it’s down, and not some other kind of dust. And it’s lessening now that the birds have hit puberty.
Guess what’s not lessening. Teenage hormones, and crowing. Oh, the crowing! Yesterday, my alarm went off bright and early. And from the office arose at least eighteen quail chick voices in a solid, hour-long crow. When I opened the door, the noise and the dust made it urgent that I house the roosters differently.
I’ve had them in a six-foot long indoor run, made out of hardware cloth. Just the roosters, as the probable hens are in the hutch. As I hear crowing, I’m removing each rooster from the hutch, and placing him in the run. The birds can’t be feather-sexed yet, so this at least makes it easy to sort them.
So far, I’ve got eighteen roosters and twelve probable hens. The “hens” could actually be roosters, but nobody in there has crowed for a couple of days. And they all get along peacefully.
There is not much peaceful about the roosters. Only the Tibetans seem to be gentle. The others attack one another, viciously at times. I have one in a cage by himself, as he seems to hate all of the other birds.
The other roosters are now in the plastic totes I sometimes use as pens and brooders. They are sorted by meanness. One is completely Tibetans, and I’d like to hurry up and get the shed and hutches built so that they have a much bigger bachelor pad. But ah, the weather. I can’t build in a thunderstorm.
It gives me time to handle the leftover dust.
The quail shed will be a blessing.
My plan is to have five coveys of regular, mixed color quail. Mostly Tibetan in those. And I want five coveys of jumbo brown quail. I’ve already collected half of the eggs to fire up the incubator for the jumbos. I’ll need three more coveys of them. I may already have enough hens to do the remaining two coveys of mixed.
If there aren’t any more roosters.
