I decided to increase our quail flock size to become self sufficient with eggs. The 4 eggs a day coming from our original quail was not enough- that equals only about 1 chicken egg a day.
Evidence that quail eggs are fun! They come in such different sizes and patterns. I've even gotten a blue one once!
They laid this one for me on Mother's Day. It's definitely a heart. Not at all a butt.
I have these nifty quail scissors to open the eggs! They tend to get a lot of shell when you crack them like chicken eggs.
I collected 48 fertilized eggs from my quail and from the Andersons and Hannah. I had some funny self-imposed rules about this- I decided that the proper way to obtain these eggs was through bartering to get the full homestead experience. I watched Hannah's animals for her while she was out of town and got quail eggs from her that way. I also got to collect her chicken eggs and I traded those with the Andersons for their quail eggs and use of their incubator. I was wheeling and dealing all over the place.
There is this test called candling where you shine a light through the egg to tell if it is fertilized or not. Unfertilized eggs are dark while fertilized ones glow neon.
18 days later, it was hatch day! A number of things went wrong. The first was that the incubator got unplugged the day before it was supposed to hatch. We noticed it in the morning, so it was at least 8 hours. This is bad because the eggs needed to be kept at a specific temperature and humidity for the whole time, but especially right before hatching. They started hatching late because of that. But eventually we saw some movement and got to watch the first little chick make her appearance!
It took each chick about half an hour from the time we first saw a pecked hole to being fully out. We had neighbors and people from the ward in and out all day watching the progress- it was quite the event! We kept a paper with names for the birds as they hatched.
More hatched overnight, and by the next morning it was very crowded in the incubator. I read conflicting advice online- some said to wait a full 2 days before taking the top off the incubator while others said to remove the hatched chicks every 24 hours and quickly replace the lid. After watching several half-hatched chicks be stomped on by the already hatched chicks, I decided to take the first batch out. Aaron held the lid over the box trying to keep as much humidity in there as possible while I grabbed the 13 hatched chicks. This turned out to be a HUGE mistake. There were at least eggs that were starting to have pipping. The rush of humidity out of the box caused the inner membrane of the eggs to shrink wrap the chicks inside their eggs. None of them beyond the original 13 made it. Lesson learned- keep the lid on! Apparently the chicks can live 2-3 days with no food.
Here's the healthy fluffballs!
They are SO SWEET!
After it became apparent that the shrink wrapped eggs were not going to hatch on their own, I tried to "deliver" two of the chicks that were partially out of their eggs and still chirping. I chipped away the egg shell with tweezers and got the inner membrane as wet as possible. They were very weak after a whole day of struggling to hatch and were not helping me out at all. I got them out but they stayed curled up in fetal position and wouldn't eat or drink, even when we held their heads right up to food and bottle caps of water. They never got fluffy like the other chicks did.
We did what we could for the poor shrink wrapped chicks. I even made them a cast for their curled up feet thinking that if they could stand then they could fluff up and maybe be able to eat better. Our efforts were fruitless and they both died. One of them passed while some neighbor kids happened to be over. They took matters into their own hands and soon had a beautifully decorated toilet paper tube casket.
They picked a spot right by my front door to bury poor Sophie.
13 out of 48 eggs is a terrible hatch rate, but at least we still had some cute fluff balls to play with! Making magnatile tunnels for the chicks was a big hit this time around. We had to sanitize the whole set after a week of using them with the chicks because boy do those growing chicks poop a lot!
There's yet another sad twist to the chick story. When the birds were old enough, I moved them outside. I put the females in one cage and males in another. Soon, the birds in the female cage started dying! I thought it was a problem with their feeder, so I made them a new one. They kept dying. I swapped the cages that the males and females were in- and the females kept dying. I think that female cage got hit with a virus. In the end I was left with 7 males but only one female! Devastating. Hannah ended up making up for my deficiencies as a quail keeper- she is remodeling her house and had to offload her animals, so I bought a bunch of her egg layers off of her. I now have 15 egg layers and get get 8-12 eggs every day. The dream of egg self-sufficiency is realized! Now to figure out how to better deal with the flies...
Here's me attempting to administer honey water to a dying bird. It was sadly unsuccessful.
The kids and I painted the quail cage after deep cleaning it in June. It was a fun Saturday morning activity.
In other animal news, we hatched more praying mantises!
So cute! Annie convinced me to go to the pet store to buy some fruit flies so that we could keep them alive for a while. We let them go when we ran out of flies.
Hannah raised around 100 broiler hens for meat. I went over to help her on meat processing day. It was informative and disgusting! I purposefully wore old shoes and ended up throwing them away afterwards. But now I'm a chicken butchering pro.
The newest entry to my bug collection- a blister beetle! I found it at the pool and had to bag it and bring it home.
A rare sighting of the wild Annabelle
Last but not least, the party animals. My friends Alexis, Hannah, and me at an ax throwing place in Tucson.
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