Incubating (Quail) for the first time
I was so excited about raising quail that I ordered fertile hatching eggs on eBay 3 days into the New Year and when they arrived, we had to go through a very steep learning curve and figure out all about incubating and hatching eggs for the first time ever!
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I admit, we had a really cheap and rubbish incubator last year, which nearly set the house on fire when it short-circuited so we never got to incubate any eggs with it. This year, we decided to do it properly, and bought ourselves a decent and highly recommended incubator as a Christmas present! After looking at many options, we decided that the Brinsea Ovation 28 Eco Egg Incubator is well within our price range and is the best at meeting all our incubation needs. It also came highly recommended on various poultry forums and groups. Let me say that this incubator is absolutely fantastic and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough! It took care of everything: keeping correct temperature and humidity and turning the eggs. This made the process so simple and I was so happy with an exceptionally good hatch rate.
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But the experience was not without problems. This year we had an exceptionally cold winter and keeping an old stone cottage with extremely high ceiling warm proved to be difficult. We have very little insulation and the little heat that our wood stove produced was just enough to keep us warm for a few hours in the evening huddled right next to it. We slept under sheepskins and with three hot water bottles tucked into the sheets, so we were warm, but the same couldn’t be said for the incubator, which was beeping and complaining of freezing indoor temperatures throughout entire January. I was happy with the machine pointing out the problems, but really not happy about waking up three times at night to turn the sirens off! We had a radiator nearby, but it did little to help and my estimation is that it added an extra £80 to keep it running for the 17 days that it was on!
A newly hatched quail chick!
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Baby quail inside the incubator
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Despite all this, our first ever hatch was a great success! I set 60 eggs into the incubator on 7th January and on 24th January 43 have hatched. I attribute this to the incredibly intuitive, smart and well designed incubator as we were so happy with a 73% hatch rate!
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Now came the challenge of raising the cute baby quail and seeing if they are really as hardy and suited to our environment as my research suggested, or if they would succumb to the high winds, low temperatures or other problems that many of our neighbours here on the island warned us about.
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