Monday 25 April 2016

Babies update


 These are the chicks - growing fast! They are two weeks old, and so far, all eight hatchlings have survived. We have been catching them each evening and putting them - with their two mothers - into a smaller cage overnight, and releasing them in the morning. Tonight will be the first night we leave them out in the garden...

 It's too early to be sure, but the way we have been telling male and females apart is the reddish colour on the male's chest, and the very distinctive speckled dots on the females. We are hoping this little one is a girl - in fact we hope most of them are girls! We shall see... They are very happy, and forage easily on their own, as well as preening and taking their first dust baths. It's been an incredibly dry summer and early autumn, and the birds are enjoying the warmth and the dry ground.



Sunday 24 April 2016

Plum: a story of survival


This is Plum, our one and only King quail (Coturnix chinensis). He is tiny, compared to the Japanese quails, and very timid. He's also strikingly beautiful, and a master of survival. We call him our Ninja bird. He started life in our garden with two girls (Cinnamon and Hazelnut) however, they were quickly killed and eaten by rats. Plum, while losing a few feathers, survived. When our rat scourge was at its worst, and chicks were being killed every night, we were sure we would lose Plum - he's only slightly bigger than a Japanese quail chick - but every morning he would zip out of his patch of metre-tall grass and show us he was still alive, before rushing back in to hide. We started to imagine him toying with the rats at night, darting here, there and everywhere at top speed, pecking and scratching until the rat was too befuddled to attack.
He missed his girls, and during most of spring and into summer he called and called, a plaintive mournful single note, endlessly echoing into the air and often - surprisingly - in the middle of the night. It's a very powerful call for such a tiny bird, and we felt very sorry for him. We tried for a long time to find him more females, but sadly - and probably rightly - pet shops will only sell pairs. Finally we found a solitary girl, who the shop was very pleased to give us. Nectarine was even smaller than Plum, only just reaching maturity, and she sat quivering and terrified in her box as we drove her home. We were worried she wouldn't feel secure in our huge open garden - or with Plum - but as we opened the box she just casually strolled out, not at all fussed. It was a lovely moment, and Plum seemed very happy - they slept each night cuddled beside each other, and the lonely calling stopped. We were hopeful of eggs and chicks in due course, but then the rats came back...and Nectarine was gone. Plum, of course, survived. We really don't know how he does it.
He's older now, and doesn't call for a mate any more, but he still lurks in his grass clump, defying the rats, and occasionally hanging out with whichever Japanese quail comes in to visit. Maybe their company is enough for him. If we do find another girl - or two - we'll get them, but it's unlikely they'll have his talent for survival. He is unique.


Tuesday 19 April 2016

Latest arrivals

 
These are our newest chicks - laid, hatched and reared by Snowpea, with the help of her older daughter, Melon. It's been an extraordinary saga so far. Snowpea went broody when Melon was only around 3 weeks old. As her mother was pretty much ignoring her, and she had no surviving brothers or sisters, Melon was a lonely little thing. So she was delighted when Snowpea finished laying and settled down to 17 days continual sitting - Melon found she could snuggle up to her as much as she liked. Snowpea would drive away any of the other birds who came near but was happy to share her nest with Melon. 

Sometimes we would find the two of them side by side, with a couple of Snowpea's eight eggs fully underneath Melon. This went on until the eggs hatched - incredibly, we had a 100% success rate on this occasion. Usually our birds manage to hatch less than half of their eggs, and of that, only a few make it to maturity. Melon appeared to be a bit confused by the hatching, and pecked at a newly emerging chick so we locked her away to keep the babies safe. After a day however, we let her out again; she went straight back to her mother and ignored the new chicks. When we gave them mealworms (a favoured treat) Melon would grab the food from the tiny babies, who would hang on for dear life, and a tug-of-war would ensue.

The little ones are now 8 days old, and Melon has fully developed her mothering instincts, foraging for insects and giving them to her younger siblings, teaching them to find their own food, and sheltering them under her wings when they are sleepy. She calls to them when they are lost, and has her own faithful followers, two or three who now prefer her over their mother. She and Snowpea sleep side by side, with the chicks huddled underneath them. Snowpea is possibly relieved to have help with a brood of eight. Co-parenting at it's best! We really hope they all make it to adulthood - but so far, so good.


Rats!

Our worst enemy is the introduced rat - Rattus norvegicus (Brown rat).


Our neighbours all have backyard chooks, and we have a large compost bin: both excellent things to have in a garden, but they are also excellent breeding and feeding grounds for rats. And rats are partial to quail eggs and baby quail, as we found out quite quickly. A large rat will attack and kill an injured or unwary adult bird if it can.
Our quail garden is completely enclosed in tough black bird netting (the type used in commercial orchards) with chicken wire placed around the perimeter as a secondary line of defence against wallabies - who will bite through the nylon net. A third of the chicken wire is dug into the ground and buried to stop anything burrowing underneath. It took us weeks to get it all set up and we thought it was impregnable.
We had a lot to learn.


We noticed we were getting fewer eggs, but thought we simply weren't finding them. Two of our little King quails had vanished but we thought they might have got through the net - they were ridiculously tiny. Then we found broken eggshells - and one night, exploring the garden with a torch, we saw a grey shadow dart out from our light and vanish into the long grass. It was huge. We set a possum trap, and checked the net the next day. The possum trap remained untriggered and there were small holes in the black netting in a couple of places - but the rat would also have to have squeezed through the chicken wire - and it had looked far too big for that. We decided it was still inside the enclosure, and started hunting for it. It was there, sure enough, hiding in the grass. We cornered it against the net in a pile of autumn leaves, and armed ourselves with two pairs of leather gloves, before blindly rummaging through the leaves and grabbing wildly when we felt it moving. We dropped it into the possum trap so we could check it wasn't actually a bandicoot. It was easily 30cm long - not including the tail! It glared at us, and fought like mad to get out of the cage. It was hugely fat from gorging on quail eggs - and extremely aggressive.



I know killing any wild creature can be a wretched thing to do - even to introduced pest species like rats - but truthfully, we didn't really hesitate before putting the cage into the frog pond and drowning its occupant. I hope it was a gentle death.



The rats kept coming though. We lost countless eggs, and, once the birds started breeding, far too many little chicks. Two of the adult birds were killed, and the daily inspection of the net for the telltale holes was a depressing morning task. Rats can get through the smallest gap - squeezing themselves through 35mm chicken wire, and biting through the black netting. We trapped and drowned two more, before reluctantly resorting to poison baits, tied to bricks and placed inside the compost bin. It worked, and we had a bit of breathing space, during which time two females successfully raised chicks.



Then we had to re-do the net, putting a second roll of smaller chicken wire over the first layer, and tying it tightly to the black netting, so the spaces were too small for even the thinnest and most determined rat to get through. This seems to have worked, so far.

The compost bin has been moved out of the quail garden and into another vegi patch, and the rats are happy digging around in it - they turn it over well! We hope that if they have enough to eat they won't go after the quails, although we still inspect the net every morning looking for holes, or signs of digging.




Meet the flock


Not the best picture quality, but...here they are:


Snowpea - hatched & raised by a foster-hen...now the mother of 8 chicks!
Melon - Snowpea's only surviving daughter from her first brood of 6

Spock - son of Spick, part of a gang known as "the Three Musketeers". Our only white(ish) quail

Apricot - in full crow!

Spick - daughter of Speck (who was killed by a rat) and mother of the Three Musketeers

Fog - son of Fig (who was also sadly killed by a rat). A gentleman quail

Three Musketeers - from left to right: Seedy (M), Spock (M) and Blork (F) enjoying a dust bath

Hello


We are a small family (mum, dad and two kids) plus 17 quails (at current count!) sharing a corner of southern Tasmania with a mob of wallabies, possums, bandicoots, sulphur-crested cockatoos, currawongs, a variety of honeyeaters, wrens and numerous lizards and beetles and other creatures. This blog is an attempt to keep track of our ongoing quail-raising saga...and we thought it might be informative for others wanting to keep, breed and enjoy quails in an organic, semi-natural environment. Our quails live in a fully netted organic orchard-vineyard-vegie garden, with plenty of weeds, flowers, veggies, mature fruit trees and grape vines. We have battled attacks from hawks, butcher-birds, neighbourhood cats and the dreaded rat. We started with four King quail (Coturnix chinensis) who were, sadly, far too small to be kept safe, and ran straight through the net, never to be seen again...with one remarkable exception, who you will meet later...

We then bought much-larger Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) and, after many struggles to turn the garden into a predator-safe area, are happily raising healthy birds in an environment as close to free-range as you can probably get.