This is the complete archive of my quail journey, documented from day one. Not just the successes — the mistakes, the losses, and the lessons are all here too. If you’re thinking about raising Coturnix quail, this is what it actually looks like.
The Journey So Far
2022 — Learning to keep quail
Started in April with six Pharaoh females and a pre-built Hatching Time cage. First egg at 8 weeks; six-egg days three weeks later. Learned the daily systems the hard way — manure trays, sand baths, feed routines. In October I tripled the flock with two breeding quintets (Jumbo Browns and Hatcher’s Choice), and immediately learned the harder lessons that come with males, pecking orders, and overcrowding: lost my first bird, separated my first bloodied male, and figured out the real limit of birds per cage. Ended the year hitting a 12-egg day — every female laying at once.
2023 — Learning to make more quail
The year started rough. Surgery just before Christmas, a septic tank collapse, losing a family cat — and in the middle of it, I forgot to refill the water tank and lost two birds. I stopped uploading for a while because I felt responsible. That winter taught me the rules I still follow today: feed always in the trays, and the tank never drops below half.
Then the new phase: my first incubation. 28 eggs went into the incubator in March; 16 hatched in April, watched live on camera. I learned about humidity control, splay leg, brooder heat management, and the hard decisions that come with hatching — we saved birds where we could and put birds down when we couldn’t. In June I culled the older flock for the first time. By July I was down to a small core flock, a pressure-washed clean setup, and a completely different understanding of what raising quail means than I had a year earlier.
2024–2025 — The quiet years
I kept raising quail, but stopped uploading. That includes a full hatch in December 2024 that was filmed and never published — footage I still plan to release. The birds didn’t stop teaching me things; I just stopped documenting them publicly. Lesson learned there too.
2026
Documentation resumed — and so did hatching. In March I set 32 eggs from Myshire Farm in the incubator; 11 chicks hatched in April and were raised with everything the earlier hatches taught me: the backwards feeder-guard trick that keeps chicks out of the food trays, nightly water checks (which caught an airlocked water line before it cost me birds), and a properly dialed-in brooder. By four weeks they were feathered out and moved into the main cage rack. Now comes the part that’s new even to me: feather-sexing a mixed batch that includes white birds, which can’t be sexed by markings at all — and managing the pecking-order squabbles that come with every new generation. The full journey is in the Quail Babies series below.
The Complete Video Archive
Every quail video, in order, from the very first one:
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Series: Quail Babies, April 2026
The full hatch-to-cage journey of the April 2026 babies:
Series: Quail Babies, March 2023
The full hatch-to-cage journey of my first time hatching eggs in March 2023:
Series: Quail Babies, September 2023
A dedicated hatch log following our Coturnix quail batch from September 2023. Watch the incubation progress, unexpected early hatches, brooder assembly, temperature monitoring, and chick care week-by-week.
This is currently a throw back Thursday playlist that I found I had never published these videos after recording them so enjoy a hatch from almost 3 years ago. New videos will appear every Thursday morning until the playlist is complete and the birds are moved to roll out cages.
Want to know when new log entries and guides are published? Sign up for updates on the homepage — or if you’re just getting started, read the Start Here guide first.