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!