Butchered my first batch of Coturnix quail yesterday

I never cared alot for dealing with the eggs but I love eating the birds. I don't have any now but I raised them several times over the years. I was getting them quite large as I would weigh all of them at 8 weeks and only keep the biggest ones for breeding. I would replace the parents with the biggest offspring each generation.

I’ve been interested in goofing off w them. How much work is it?

This is how I butcher mine



I use a chamber vac for mine after a 24 hour brine.

I use a pair of fiskers garden scissors, the bottom point is rounded over which makes it easier to go in to clip the back out. Comes with a sheath with a built in ceramic sharpener, highly recommend. I was averaging about a minute per bird by the time I got the hang of it.

Your setup sounds about like mine, I have an 8’ by 2’ footprint with four cages total, two high. Each has an open area 3’ by 2’ with a tray underneath and a side 1’ x 2’ sandbox. I’ve found they mostly shite through the mesh and lay eggs on the sand. Currently have 10 hens and 2 roosters in each cage and it seems like that’s about right. Any more and I’d be dumping the trays more than I care to.

I have a 5 gallon gravity fed watering system set up but where I screwed up was putting the autofill cups inside the cages, they jump on them constantly spilling water into the trays, which makes them smell. This weekend I plan to rework the cups to where they’re on the outside and the birds stick their head out into them to drink. Still haven’t 100% figured it out, but that’s been the biggest struggle so far.

I had a bunch of laying hens and built a couple tractors to start raising meat birds. Got pissed off one evening and gave away all my animals before I even bought my meat birds. One day when I slow down I’ll start raising meat chickens and maybe even quail.

My dad raised bobwhites when I was a kid, they would get as big and round as a softball.

Talk about good eating, deep fried whole.

Nice. I have 3 roosters and 11 hens right now. I’m pickling about 9 dozen every week and a half. I sell a dozen pickled in a half pint jar to friends and family and the demand is higher than I can keep up with.

The extra roosters I butchered I egg washed, rolled in flour and fried. Those are my personal stash, I don’t sell those.

It’s a fun hobby, but I can’t go out of town more than 3 days with the feed and water situation. I’m going to start collecting eggs to hatch June 15th, set the incubator on June 25th and butcher my remaining adults before we go to the beach for the week of the 4th of July. Eggs should hatch a week or so after we get back. So I don’t have to ask anyone to look after them while we are gone.

I got one Celedon egg layer. I did an experiment where I took out a different hen each afternoon and put her in a storage tote until she laid her egg. Regular egg layers got a pink zip tie band. After about the 6th one I finally figured her out and put a different color zip tie on her.

I boil my eggs in my shrimp pot so I can lower the basket and drop them all at once. I like to have my water boiling, drop them for 5 minutes, remove from burner but leave them in hot water for 5 minutes, then an ice bath for 10 minutes. That's the easiest peeling egg tip I got from a facebook group. I can peel one egg in under a minute.


Candied pickled beets and jalapeno pickled eggs...


Habanero, cayenne and crawfish boil spicy pickled eggs...


Some of my quail...


I have a light on a timer that kicks on at dusk and stays on for 4 hours so they get enought light to lay all year...

Good looking setup, I have a couple celedons mixee in too. Working on a way to keep the feed going more than 3-4 days but haven’t figured it out yet.

These egg peelers off of amazon/ebay work great once you get the hang of it, few seconds per egg if they’re cracked well.

How long do the quail usually live? Interesting idea to just kill them off every once in awhile, eat them?, and then start off new?

The issue with chickens is they turn pets and stop being food/ livestock pretty quickly