Henry Brown

QUAIL WARS
A New Poop









A little while ago in a galaxy not all that far away. . .
. . .in fact maybe on my back porch. . .


bababaBA BA bababaBA BA


QUAIL WARS


SLANTY SUBTITLES: The Empire had trapped six resistance fighters in a hardware cloth box made with 1 by and some legs so their poop could fall down through the wire onto soil.

RESISTANCE QUAIL FIGHTER: The Empire has forgotten to feed us!

SLANTY SUBTITLES: The resistance fighters had begun to organize.  

(Quail sit around staring in different directions).

EVIL MUSIC: ba, ba, ba, ba-ba, ba, ba-ba.

DARTH QUAIL: Luke, I am your father.  I think.  There were a lotta hens around, and we really didn’t keep track of which egg rolled out of which hen. . . so. . .ah. . .well this is awkward. . .Luke, I MIGHT be your father.

They fight.  Peck, peck, peck.  

DARTH QUAIL: babaBA!

QUAIL STORMTROOPER: Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work on me, old man.  I don’t have a mind, I’m a quail! My brain is the size of a pea!

CQuailPO: babaBA!

RquailDquail: baBAbababa babaBA woaoao!

CQuailPO: You know, you sound more like a chicken when you do that woaoao sound.

PRINCESS QUAILA: Here are the plans to the Death Star.  We’ll break in here to liberate the Grubblies.

LUKE QUAILWALKER: What happened to your neck feathers? Did the Imperial Stormtroopers…?

LEIA: Hey, stop pecking my neck, Luke. Ooh, food!  (Peck peck peck)

RESISTANCE FIGHTER: Let’s focus, quails.  We need a diversion.  Here’s the plan, we’ll poop in our water, that’ll show the Empire!  Then, we’ll drown ourselves in it, get mysterious illnesses, fly straight up and hit our head on the ceiling for no reason, and poop in our water.  Look, our water froze over! It’s a sign! Now we can walk on it and poop on it more easily!   Luke Quailwalker, looks like you’re up.

LUKE QUAILWALKER: Just like hunting larvae on Gramulon 5.  Only problem, sir, I can’t really control my bowel moments, they just come at random.

RESISTANCE FIGHTER: A Jedi quail must learn to trust his feelings.  May be Grubblies be with you.  babaBA!

Oops, sorry about that.  Here's all 12 eggs for real.

OK, here's my quail eggs and the quail they came out of.  Actually, this is a male, who just happened to walk into the nesting box when I took the picture, but I swear the hen was in it two seconds before.  They don't hold still.  We have three layers, on this side of the divider there's just one male and one female. The female lays "blue" eggs, which are slightly bluish and very unusual.  Most quail eggs appear like Dalmatian fur, big black spots.  The other ones we got from another person full-grown (because we had only one layer), and they lay the Dalmatian-style ones.  But weirdly, the spots are not dark black on ours, just faint blue.  Is it because we feed them live food (maggots and black soldier fly larvae and mealworms and whatever invisible bugs are in their dust baths?). is it because I ferment their feed? I don't know.  The blue eggs are smaller than the others but the shells are firm on all of them, in fact they're kind of hard to crack when you're trying to eat them.  Fun fact, people usually use special quail-egg-cutting scissors for these, but I haven't made the investment.  (By the way, I would NOT recommend raising quail to any die-hard permaculturist, except for learning purposes or unless you can re-wild them in your landscape somehow and make a deal where they drop off a few eggs for you.  They're too wild to free-range (they'll escape) but too dumb to take care of themselves and come home at night.  If I were really going to go this route I'd try and cross them with wild birds somehow, but these are Japanese animals and so they're not likely to do that.  Unless I find a way to crossbreed them with a duck.  Or a zebra.  THey're a ton of work for relatively low return, and they have an uncanny ability to be male and even be male without seeming to be male.  One didn't start making sperm till it was 10 weeks old or so, much older than it's suppose to, so we thought the fucker was a female.  He/they were so cute though.  And we eventually got our 12 eggs.  

Chickens: because we're smart, we eat all your kitchen scraps, your mice, and your ticks, we till your soil and aerate your cow pies, we come home to roost, and we lay big nutritious eggs right in our nesting boxes.

Quail: because buhbuhBAH!

Also, quail don't really lay in the nesting box.  Sometimes they lay in there by accident, but they're just as likely to lay anywhere that's not in the nesting box.  "I don't need no fucking nesting box, I'm a quail! I'll lay where I want to, don't fuck with me! buh-buh BAAA!"  So I might have to CGI part of my badge.

Mike Haasl wrote:As I read the BB, it just says fowl.  Since a quail is a fowl, I think you'd be fine collecting 12.  And doing it over a few collection cycles is fine as well.  Good luck!

Thanks Mike.  OK, as long as no one calls fowl.  (Couldn't resist.). I'm up to 9, the fuckers took a union break, I should be able to post them tomorrow.  Obviously if there's 72 eggs in there I'll take pictures too, but I'm not holding my breath.

the photos loaded on my computer, did you re-check it Mike?

Mike Haasl wrote:Hi Justyn, looks like your photos didn't load.  Here's a link to a guide on posting photos:  How to post an image on permies.com

Henry Brown wrote:can I count 48 quail eggs for this BB?  (4 per chicken egg).  And since I will eat them, just show them in batches of 6 with the date indicated some way?  Thanks.

I have 3 laying coturnix quail, and four freeloaders.  (One of them used a preferred pronoun to fool us, very obnoxious to actual female quail.)

OK, I'll make it 6 per chicken egg, chicken eggs average 50-70g, quail about 10g, so 6 quail eggs per makes it 6 x 12 = 72.  

can I count 48 quail eggs for this BB?  (4 per chicken egg).  And since I will eat them, just show them in batches of 6 with the date indicated some way?  Thanks.

I have 3 laying coturnix quail, and four freeloaders.  (One of them used a preferred pronoun to fool us, very obnoxious to actual female quail.)

Thanks for the post on the bolt, I followed the link and it has citations to Temple Grandin, which is reassuring.

In my community we always did ritual offerings with knife, and now I have to do it on my own.  I am sad to say I didn't do such a great job with my first animal, but at least I was decisive and it could have been worse.  It was a quail. I just feel a need to shake a little trauma out of my system here.  I appreciate getting to "process."  If I ever do larger animals someday I hope I will be able to do better.

I'm not crazy about the homestead harvest feed, it's just less bad than the most widely available brand.  Still open to recommendations for quail or chicken feed (can supplement with the larvae).  Thanks.