Incubating Quail Eggs

[GaryD]

This thread is for discussion about incubating Japanese Quail eggs.

[nrllee]

Hi Gary,

Do you feed your chicks turkey starter? I haven't been able to find gamebird feed locally. I thought about mixing soyabean meal in with normal chickstarter but I don't know in what proportions or doesn't it matter? The turkey starter is a lot more expensive though. I realize that you feed the adults layer mix with soyabean meal mixed in - again in what proportions and when do you switch if at all? ie for normal chicken chicks I switch from starter to grower at 8 weeks and then onto layer mix when they are 20 weeks. Is there something similar for quail?

Btw, I hatched 20 from a setting of 36 in my homemade bator - I'm quite pleased with that. The eggs came in the mail. Of the 16 that didn't hatch, 1 was DIS (pipped at the wrong end), 3 early deaths, the rest were clears. I think they are the white/fawn variety - most of them have yellow down, only a couple are yellow with black stripes.



Lilian

[nrllee]

As an aside, I found out this morning that one of the chicks has a deformity of the beak - the top half of the beak is shorter than the bottom. It's eating and drinking okay but I guess I shouldn't be breeding from this one?

[GaryD]

Hi Lillian,

Do you feed your chicks turkey starter? I haven't been able to find gamebird feed locally.

We've fed turkey starter although I'd probably prefer to give them a premium (unmedicated) layer mash which has had its protein levels boosted with the addition of soyabean or meat meal.

I'd consider something like 4 parts of layer mash and one part each of soybean or meat meal.

I'd also think about adding Vitamin B in some form or the other. We used to use Pentavite before the manufacturer began flavouring it. I'll see if I can dig up the name of our most recent Vitamin B product.

This ration can be fed to all quail.....breeders, chicks and growers. Provide your birds with a good quality greenfeed like silver beet, fresh lucerne (alfalfa) or similar.

At around 55%, your hatch could be better but there are lots of things that impact hatch rates including, genetics, diet, incubator regime, etc.....and given that you eggs came by mail, you should be satisfied.

Based on a recent experience, I'd suggest that one of the first things that breeders do is get their incubator thermometers checked for accuracy. I recently encountered a breeder who was experiencing catastrophic incubation failures. She eventually noticed that she had a 20 degree difference in the reading across two thermometers.

Gary

[nrllee]

Thanks Gary. The incubator is a homemade one from a styrofoam box and it was the first time I fired it up so I'm pretty happy with the results. The 36 that I set some of them had minute cracks on the shell from the post (4-5 cracked through when I first opened up the parcel) but I set them anyway. I guess the real test would be when my breeders start to lay and I set the eggs they lay. Yes I had 2-3 thermometers in there just in case - my thermostat isn't as accurate as I would've like - I may invest in a more accurate one but it will suffice for now.

When I run out of turkey starter I'll do what you suggest and just mix the soyabean meal in. Vitamin B - I would've thought with the grain based diet (which is vitamin B rich) it wouldn't have been necessary?

I haven't thought about giving them green feed - they are so small. I even mush up the turkey starter crumbles for them - the crumbles look too big for their mouths.

Thanks again,
Lilian

[GaryD]

Hi Lillian,

Given the primitive nature of your incubator, you should be particularly pleased with the outcome.

I'm still trying to find some of my original notes around feed formulations so I'll respond in detail about the Vitamin B thing later.

Start them on the greenfeed as soon as you can......it will have a marked impact on how they respond to it later. Initially, they'll just play with it (and poop all over it) but they'll gradually begin to eat it. The end result is lower feed cost and better meat.

Gary

[julie]

Just read your post Gary on thermometers.


l am the breeder that you refer to. l agree wholeheartedly with your comments about checking the accuracy of the thermometers!

The fertility rate of the eggs l was incubating dropped from an average of about 65% to almost 0% in the space of about 6 weeks. The few that were hatching were doing so about 3 days later than they should have andwere quite sickly birds.I was completely confused until l spoke to you and Jan about the situation. You advised me that there could only be 3 things that were going wrong to cause a problem of that magnitude. The birds themselves were defective in some way, the diet was incomplete or the incubation process was faulty.

I re-arranged the birds, then changed their diet. No improvement. It really didn't occur to me that the thermometers were not working properly. It was only some weeks later when l opened one incubator straight after opening another that l realised there was a marked difference in how warm the incubators felt to my hand. BINGO. On checking the accuracy of the thermometers it became obvious that there was a tremendous fluctuation in their accuracy. One was reading 99.5F when in reality the temperature was 79.5F. The other one wasn't much better either. And both these pieces of equipment had been bought from a reliable source.

So do as Gary advises - check the accuracy of your equipment before starting any incubation procedures!

My hatch rate is now back up to around 65% again, so l'm very happy about that.

Thanks for the invaluable assistance Gary!!!!!!


Julie

[nrllee]

I'm pretty happy with my homemade incubator - and yes I did test it a few days before I put the eggs in there with different thermometers placed in different parts of the incubator. I'm pretty happy with the hatch rate seeing they were eggs in the mail and also they pretty much hatched spot on day 17 so the incubator was working as it should've. I will probably still modify it so that it suits quail eggs more - I built it initially to incubate chook eggs and they are a lot bigger so I find that with quail eggs there seems to be alot of wasted 'air space' because they are so much smaller.

The chicks are growing so fast. I did have one die on me this morning - I noticed that it wasn't moving much yesterday and it was one of those chicks that seemed to be continually chirping all the time. Not sure what was wrong with it...but it died. The others are putting on weight fast and feathering up. I can't get over how quick they are - they dart about everywhere - very unlike chicken chicks.

Lilian

[Fordson]

Hi Lilian

I'm interested in how I could make an incubator. Have you posted any details on how you made yours or any links that may help me.
I'd like to experiment with raising quails without outlaying too much money at this stage.

Thanks..........Mick

[nrllee]

This was Mark1 - I hatched some chook eggs in this one but then modified it (using a bigger styrofoam box) to hatch quail eggs. I'll try to get pics of Mark 2 up.

Homemade incubator Mark 1

By far the biggest expense would be the thermostat - if you get a good one - I've only recently discovered good ones on ebay - then that's 1/2 the battle.

cheers
Lilian