The Quail are in the Mail !!!

You may have read about my $1,000 rat story, well that rat's favorite meal was button quail. A small quail about the size of your fist. After the rat committed suicide (that's how I'm going to play it), I was left with one single and lonely button quail. However, with the holidays around the corner, I could not let the little guy spend them alone. No one should be alone for the holidays.

There were two ways to deal with this issue. The easy and sane way which was to go back down to the bird store and buy a couple more quail.  Quick, easy but boring.

Then there's my way; ten times more difficult, certainly more expensive, but far more rewarding. I usually make these decisions without asking my wife, otherwise sanity would prevail and life would be less interesting.

So, I went on the internet input my credit card info and presto – a dozen fertilized quail eggs are delivered to my front door within a week. The eggs arrived and of course I have no way to hatch them. I thought that if each family member was willing to sit on three eggs or if all of us just took shifts sitting on all one dozen eggs, the problem was solved. As usual, I received very little support from my family.

Plan B, make an incubator. I looked around the garage and found all the materials I needed to make my own incubator. I took a plastic box, an old computer power supply, a shop light, a light level controller and made a Frankenstein incubator. I felt just like MacGyver.

I now had my incubator, I put my eggs in there and now all I had to do was wait about 16 days. Wrong! The instructions said the eggs needed to be rotated three times per day, ok this did not seem so bad. Well once the incubator started, I discovered that the temperature variation within my own home and the poor insulation of the plastic box required me to check the temperature frequently and make adjustments. If my family had just agreed to sit on the eggs this would have been much easier. Anyway, a couple of times the temperature actually got close to 110 degrees and I was certain that I had fried eggs on my hands.

I waited, I rotated eggs, I adjusted temperatures for 20 days. On the 20th day I woke up and my usual routine was to check the temperature of the eggs and rotate them, but to my surprise there was this tiny, fuzzy, black quail running around the other eggs.  This thing was about the size of my thumb.