Collect a Dozen Eggs - PEP BB animal.sand.collecteggs

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.

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.

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!

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

We have had hens for most of this year. 15 birds of mixed breeds, bought about 8 weeks old.

They have a large coop with woodchip deep litter, and a good sized run with compost heaps, woodchips and various trees and shrubs. They have started slowing down, but we are still getting about 10 eggs a day on average.

We eat about half ourselves, and sell the rest at an honesty box outside the house. The egg sales full covers the cost of their feed, which is nice :)

We currently have about 25 chicken and 7 duck hens laying. Right now we're getting about 10 to 12 chicken and 6 duck eggs a day.

There's 3 Barred Rocks , 4 Americana and 2 Reds  , 2 Welsumer  A Buff Orpington  and a Blue Orpington , And we also have an assortment of barnyard mixes from a good looking Buff Orpington rooster we used to have.

The ducks are Golden 300s.

Most off the chickens use the rollaway nesting box I built. But the ducks rarely use the boxes I built them. They seem to prefer a random corner theyre huddling in in or to just drop them by the pool. I find about half of my duck eggs by the pool.

I have 12 laying hens of various breeds.  Currently I'm getting about 9 eggs per day.  They have free access to my fenced orchard.  I feed organic layer pellet. Their main predator is the possum.