Marvellous millet

Feeding a large brood can become quite a bit of work.
Despite having a very large, and very productive garden, we still find we are feeding our voraciously hungry flock extra seeds a couple of times a day. They obviously work up quite an appetite scrounging around for insects and greenery, and demand supplementary seeds to be handed out.

Spick enjoying extra seeds

We initially brought quails into our garden to help us control pest insects - once we had everything fully netted we were protected from possums and wallabies and cockatoos but we also no longer had robins and wrens hunting the aphids and thrips and slugs etc. So in came the quails. They don't scratch up seedlings, and they do eat some insects - but they dislike slugs and, as they don't really fly, they don't get any insect above ground level... They do, however, give us wonderfully creamy and delicious eggs - when we can find them.

Ripening finger millet

Proso millet (we think). This is a favourite food

And they eat! We buy large bags of seeds from a local pet shop - marked as "budgie feed" it seems to be a mixture of millet, linseed and poppy seed. Our birds love the millet particularly, so we planted some, to see what would happen. It grew beautifully. There are two different types; a delicate frond-like millet (we think it's proso millet) and a stubby darker seed, possibly finger millet. Once it began to ripen we found the birds leaping up to pull down the fronds.
They also eat sunflower seeds, and we've always grown sunflowers - mostly for their beauty, but we do use some of the seeds. Interestingly, the quails don't seem to eat the sunflower seeds until autumn - if you offer them sunflower seeds in spring they ignore them, but in autumn and winter they go wild, attacking the flower heads with gusto and gorging on the seeds.

Sunflower heads drying before harvesting

Chicks enjoying a captured frond of proso millet

Their favourite treat are meal worms. We've tried breeding these, but with only limited success. We give them to the sitting mothers, and to the chicks for the first couple of weeks. They will literally go mad over them, fighting each other - a tug-of-war between two tiny chicks over a meal worm that is longer than their head is a sight to see! The adults eat them easily, but the first time we gave them to our chicks we thought we'd choked them - the worms would be gulped down, then the chick would stand motionless, gasping, and occasionally the worm would be brought back up...it looked agonizing, but they always came running for more.


They also love it when we rake back our compost heap and they can scratch around for worms and earwigs and whatever tiny beasties live in the rotting soil. They might not be the pest controllers we had hoped they'd be, but they are a lot of fun, and excellent company in the garden.