Quail… You don’t always get what you want.

“You don’t always get what you want.” At least that’s what the song says, and in the case of our quail. that was true. We wanted to hatch eggs for a homeschool project, and we had it stuck in our heads that we wanted to hatch duck eggs, with the kids.

Being in customer service, you get to know a lot of people from every walk of life. I find myself always saying “I know a guy….” For example, I know a guy….who can get me the really good fireworks.” Well in this case I know a guy….who raises gamebirds that he sells and ships out to game farms all over the country. So I ask him if he would sell me some duck eggs. He says no problem, he will just give me a dozen; and I could even bring out the kids to his hatchery, to pick out the eggs themselves. We thought that would be even cooler, science lesson and a field trip, two birds with one stone. (No pun intended.)

Well, Wisconsin weather messed that deal up. We got a late snow and they lost most of their duck hatching eggs. So we get a call from the guy and he felt really bad about it and asks me if we would be interested in quail eggs, so at least we would have something to hatch. I agreed, I had never thought about quail before, but that sounded kind of fun. To be honest, I had to look up quail, after I spoke with him to make sure I had the right bird in mind.

He brought me the eggs, which are about twice the size of an olive, and we put them in our incubator and got to hatching!

We don’t have an automatic egg turner so we have to turn our eggs by hand with the x and o method. We even took our incubator camping with us so we could keep turning the eggs. We got 7 birds on our first hatch.

We have continued raising Bobwhite quail since. They are enjoyable to hear singing in the barn, they are very cheap to feed, and their eggs are considered a delicacy. We have continued to grow our flock which has been a struggle, as they are a fragile bird, and when we make a mistake it can be deadly. We currently have about 24 birds in our flock.

The song says “You don’t always get what you want. You get what you need.” I’m not sure quail was what we needed, they definitely were not what we wanted, but I’m happy that we have them.

-Daniel