Quail diary – 73. War and piss

It arrived in the post; an innocuous brown envelope containing a plastic bag and a card. “Biohazard!” read the card, in thick black ink. “Handle with gloves, mask, tongs … enclosed one small section of minging ferret bedding for purposes of rodent eradication.”

Senior Teen is struck dumb. New depths of weirdness have been sunk to. “You’ve given our address to a stranger on the internet to send you ferret poo …?” Words fail her.

Actually, it’s not poo. And Wallfishwife, who kindly detached it from under Badger, Bear, Lynx, Ewok and Brian, seems very nice and not at all likely to firebomb us, which is apparently what Senior Teen expects strangers encountered via the internet to get up to. Wallfishwife not only retrieved the honking rag from her little ferret chums, but got a friend of her own (close and loyal, at a guess) to give it a sniff – to confirm potency. (Ferret owners, she fears, have a tendency to maintain that their pets don’t smell. “It’s not a myth!” she writes. “Just your poor nose gives up and you walk around town in a stinky sweater with people gagging in your wake!”)

So I stuck my own nose into the plastic bag and took a lungful. Wow! Eye-watering. Essence of predator, you can almost feel the teeth. If that doesn’t scare the mice into the next parish, nothing will. But to avoid frightening the quail into catalepsy too, I only put a scrap actually in the quail house. The rest went under the roof, where the mice hang out. Let the biological warfare commence.

Quail diary – 72. On the house

Quail house I was a customised rabbit hutch, a thing of beauty ...

The tale of the quail and their mouse is big in Iran, India and Poland, and really huge (relatively) in the US and Canada, but in Australia – not so much. Overnight every night WordPress records new hits on this blog, or another red spot erupts on the Clustrmap as some quail fancier somewhere in the world stumbles on the site. The ticker doesn’t show how long they stay or how much they read, but it does log that mostly they are seeking advice on quail housing (or, bizarrely, fox and rat prints in snow).

So, with apologies to everyone who looked in vain before – and a strong recommendation to seek out some rather more knowledgeable source, here’s almost everything I’ve learned the hard way over the past year and a half about keeping  鹌鹑, ορτύκια, 메추라기 or quail.

... but not really quite ideal for handling quail

Our first coop was a 6ft solid wooden rabbit hutch found by the side of the road and lovingly reroofed and repainted with low-emission, animal-friendly paint in a cheery shade of sea green. It was a Rolls-Royce of coops, built like a tank to withstand anything from foxes to footballs, but the attached 6ft  knee-high run (as approved by Katie Thear, page 44 of my edition) proved crippling in every aspect of handling and sanitation. There’s nothing like grovelling head down in damp guano every week to make you rethink your domestic arrangements. The Rolls-Royce hutch was therefore duly put out on the street again, and claimed by a primary school teacher with a rescued battery hen. Well done, that man.

Quail house II was easier for sitting in

Quail house II (6ft x 4ft x 4ft high) rose over a brick-lined pit at the shady end of the garden. The idea was that the quail would have access to earth and insects, for dustbathing and foraging – which they love – and I would have access to the quail. Window panels in the lower roof lift out to let in food and water, or collect eggs (with a soup ladle on a long stick), or to tip out dirty bedding. The underground wall was supposed to keep tunnelling rodents out, but this proved optimistic, largely because the mice come in over the top instead, apparently parachuting off the apple tree and abseiling down the water hopper when all other avenues are stamped shut, chopped down, and otherwise nailed up. Of course, letting them raise a family once inside just because they looked cold was a bit short-sighted.

... offering walk-in accommodation for seven pampered quail and room to swing a mouse

The outer house is made of wire and laths on a wooden frame, with a corrugated bitumen roof, and has a smaller, lighter rabbit hutch inside it for shelter. It is tall enough and wide enough to sit in, making it easier to muck out, and technically big enough to accommodate about three times more quail (16) than are currently in residence, but the extra space means less pecking and generally happier birds, with room for flights of fancy like the compost bin “radiator”. However, it is draughty. Which quail don’t like, it turns out. They don’t perch, and the hutch “nesting box” (though a handy seat) is rarely used, except to hide behind in piles of straw. They love the bare earth for dustbathing, but prefer to do so in patches of sunlight, and they lay their well camouflaged eggs randomly wherever they happen to be, in straw, shredded paper or earth, which makes them hard to find and easy to step on. As, indeed, are the quail.

They have a tendency to hop if startled, sometimes backwards, and explode vertically upwards if alarmed. They can fly (and do), but if they escape, they will vanish into the nearest clump of flowers and the best way to recapture them is to throw a towel over them. Like budgies they go quiet when the lights go out.

It’s been 17 months, two quail houses and 776 eggs since the quail came to our garden. They have taught me about daylight and dandelions, and the true price of food when you have to kill a sick animal. I still bear the scars – literally, in the case of the thumb I nearly lost cutting the roof, but soon days here in the northern hemisphere will be longer than our nights again, the blackbirds and robins will start to lay eggs too, and the whole adventure will begin again.

Perhaps it’s even time to improve on the quail house. I’m thinking mouse-proof roof … Get out that first aid kit.

Quail diary – 71. Lay, lady, lay

The quail in winter - view from inside the plastic yurt

The baby mice under the quail hutch have grown up and vanished. Probably into the roof. The last one, slower than the rest when Junior Teen cautiously lifted the hutch for a peek, allowed himself to be scooped up and gently warmed in the hollow of her hand. He liked it so much he began to wash his face, eventually transferring to her shoulder for a better view.  Ahhh. No camera handy, of course.

She was quite put out two days later, when her finger was nipped as she stuck it into a small tunnel in the earth floor. So much for the entente cordiale. The snow’s melted. It’s now every man (and mouse) for himself again. Let the daily stamping down of the holes re-commence.

Gammy cat, stir-crazy after three months confined to the kitchen with a steel pin up one leg, is spending his rehab pressed to the quail house door – nose glued to perspex, twitching. It is noticeable that he doesn’t climb on the roof any more, but he wants his mouse. At least, I hope it’s the mice he’s after. Accidentally let the wire flop open yesterday, and turned to find a pair of manic yellow eyes in the doorway, fixed on the quail.

So, £700 invested in vet bills and he a) kills one of the quail, or b) kills the baby mice we saved from a fate worse than … Hmm. I can see I may not have thought this one through quite rigorously enough.

Still no quail eggs. Daylight: 8 hours 54 mins, and counting. Temperature in run: 0C. Temperature in mini anaerobic digester - taken with rectal thermometer strapped to wooden spoon: 34C (shurely shome mistake?). Oeuf still has a dung ball on one toe and Glenda’s looking bedraggled, but millet seedlings are sprouting round the water hopper again and the urge to get out and dig the garden is mounting. Hark, the compost heaps are calling. Spring, here we come.

Quail diary – 70. See how they run

Baby mice, seven days old, still blind but furry now

The baby mice under the quail hutch are a week old, still blind, but now softly furry. They wriggle and squeak and wave little pink feet in protest when their snug nest is opened to the cold for the camera. Mum – of whom usually no more is seen than a tail vanishing up the string into the roof space – is exhausted, and they’re not walking yet. Two days ago she was briefly encountered zizzing in a peaceful, one-mouse sized hollow in the bag of spare straw. But the quail don’t seem to mind.

Redwing stripping Pyracantha berries in a London garden

By next week the babies will be everywhere, which will give the covey something to tut about – if the Teens don’t forcibly adopt the family into Junior Teen’s bedroom first. Even the feed merchant admitted succumbing to the infants’ mousey cuteness. He took in a nest of pink jelly babies found between the stacks two months ago and now has a houseful – “some of them still in the cage” … Our cats would have conniptions.

Outside the run, the urban fox circles, licking his lips and treading great doggy paw prints into the snow. Judging by the marks on the back doorstep, he regularly peers in at us under the blind too. Which is unsettling. He’s a glowing advertisement for a diet of chip wrappers and dropped burgers.

Meanwhile, we’ve also been invaded by Redwings, quarrelling in small flocks in the apple tree and pyracantha. Supermarket shelves may be bare as farmers out in the frozen fields struggle to lift their carrots, but the wild things aren’t daft.

Or at least, not as daft as homo sapiens still struggling to take the temperature of her compost heap.

Quail diary – 69. A winter’s tale

The bantams

The bantams are thirsty. Every night their water freezes, even in the emergency hopper slipped into the roost, and every morning they fall upon the fresh supply like smokers on their first espresso. They are still laying, despite the sub-zero temperatures, but the only sign of life from the bee hive beside them is the occasional little corpse pushed off the front step into the snow.

There are fox prints – and foxes – on the streets and in the gardens everywhere. The big daddy trotted past the front gate at 7.17am, buff and bushy, not turning a hair as I dug out the car. At night he and his urban chums sit in the park, in full view, and stare down late travellers. They should coco - I didn’t have a camera on me, much less a pack of hounds and a pink coat. It is Britain’s coldest winter since 1981, when my mum sent me food parcels at college, but not as cold as 1963, when the sea froze and a teeny me scratched across the ice on learner blades. Yes, distressingly I remember both.

In the quail house the water does not quite freeze each night. The quail sit serene on a foot of staw, like the princess on the pea, and the thermometer hovers around 0C, against minus 4C outside. The builders’ tarpaulin spread over the roof as additional insulation just before the last frost has proved a bit hit – particularly with the mice, who now hang out up there, out of reach of cats and foxes, running down the walls to plunder the quails’ food with a casual athleticism that makes a mockery of my efforts with the perspex. Like teenagers, they never go out. They’re probably up there now, scattering chewed millet husks and dirty socks.

How do they do that? Mouse in the quail house

Mouse in the quails' straw

Oh, and the rebuilt nest under the hutch squeaks when prodded. Some of the babies have evidently survived. I haven’t the heart to evict them. A strange wintry cameraderie abounds, embracing not just one’s chilled fellow men but even little cold mice.

Quail diary – 68. The mouse murderer

Day-old baby mice, born under the quail hutch

Tragedy in the quail house. After three freezing days of minimal husbandry, the underside of the hutch again reveals a maze of earthwork trenches and another nest ball of spun straw. As I lift, a tiny svelte mouse runs out between my wellies, and swings hand over hand up the cord on the water feeder to vanish – level with my eyes – into the roof lagging. It isn’t till I’ve pulled apart the nest that I notice the naked pink mouselings scattered like jelly babies at my feet. Seven.

Barely 2cm long, with no hair or ears and bruised, blind eyes, they are newborn. Or only a day old at most. My fat mouse is thin again. At a price. But her infant family is too young to save. Harass muscles in, and lunges hungrily so I shoo her away and scoop the seven little slugs into my hand. They are no bigger than my little toe, and already too cold to move. (“You shouldn’t have handled them,” says Junior Teen, heading for the door in a blur of bottle-red bangs, matinee idol make up and inappropriate shoes. “Now their mum will eat them.” I look at her, thoughtfully.)

I retrieve the remains of the nest and put the babies and the hutch back. Yes, I know. But Google reveals that baby mice that young need feeding every two hours, day and night. Oh no. They’re all yours, Mrs Mouse. I’ve done my time.

On the sofa in the warm the cats lie as dead.

Quail diary – 67. Happy New Year!

The quail and their compost bin-cum-central heating

New year’s day and the sun is shining through a sharp frost. It’s 3C in the quail house. The girls are tucked up in the warm, dark fug in the straw between the hutch and the rear wall, unmoving. They blink vacuously as the boots arrive; amiable but detached like maiden aunts on the third sherry. But they don’t get up. Not even when the mouse breaks cover from under the layers’ pellets, and hurls herself into the straw beneath their tail feathers. Hey, who ate all the pies? That mouse is getting fat. (“No exercise and too much food,” mutters Himself, glumly contemplating the excessive Christmas lunches still stockpiled in the fridge. What were we thinking?)

It is a month since the quail laid their last egg (no. 776), three months since the autumn equinox when they were supposed to stop laying, and nine days since we passed the longest night of the year on the way back into the light.  The days are lengthening again. Today the sun is 147,320,000 km away and closing. By January 10, next week, the days will be as long again as the last time the quail laid – 8hrs and 10mins, and the sun as near and the angle at noon the same. Will there be eggs? Quail like 12 hours daylight, which is not till the vernal equinox in March (20th). Still, mealie worms have been issued, just in case.

Of course, the bantams next door are still laying, summer and winter. Show-offs. Nine eggs since December 6, eaten fried with the last of the Christmas ham. Yum. Come on, quail. Pickled ones just aren’t the same.

Spring is springing. The blackbirds are stabbing at the thawing lawn for defrosting worms. The robin is carolling in the apple tree. Even the fox is back - paws on the back step, peering in through the french windows, to the consternation of the cats, who sit bolt upright on their tails before the glass, like Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee,  stunned to silence. He’s a big bugger. That’ll focus their minds as they poo on my bulbs. Happy new year!

Quail diary – 66. In the bleak midwinter

Quail in winter. Oeuf in straw and cylinder jacket

8am sunrise and it’s 5C inside and outside the quail house - though another icy blast is forecast for New Year’s eve. The quail are in good feather, plump and calm inside their plastic yurt; a stack of bright eyes peeping round their compost bin, ribbeting conversationally, occasionally even dustbathing.

Five days it’s taken, during the coldest winter week London has had for 25 years; hour after hour, squatting inside the wire behind a rampart of ice stilettoes, pinning up perspex and plastic bags, fiddling about in the straw for dropped screws and drawing pins, all the while radiating bodyheat. The quail love me. Fluffed out like pom-poms against the cold, they chirped and chuntered at my feet - leaning confidingly against the warm rubber whenever the wellies stood still long enough.

Once, the wellies stood still for so long that a mouse popped up between them. A straw twitched under the hutch, and a tiny nose appeared, followed by outsize pink ears and a sleek little body no longer than a child’s finger. The infant – for it clearly was a very young mouse indeed – leaped for the exit up the wire (designed to keep interlopers out) only to ricochet off the new internal sheet glazing. Baffled, it tried again, resulting in a dizzying backflip, before reeling back under the hutch, stunned. The boots never budged. (“What? You didn’t stamp on it?” said Toothless Granny, who was over for Christmas.) No. What a wuss…

However, no good deed goes unpunished. Each day the drafts were driven back, and each day the first sound of wellies crunching across the frozen grass had the quail queuing to snuggle up, until finally the job was done: lagged, double-glazed, sheeted. The cold was shut out.

And like the MR James ghost story, as I pinned in the last pin, a “thin voice from among the bed curtains said ‘Now we’re shut in for the night’ …” Yup, I’ve only gone and trapped the mouse on the inside.

Quail diary – 65. On the first day of Christmas

Snowy garden with distant quail house - a snug 0C inside new lagging and double 'glazing'

On the first day of Christmas my absent neighbours left to me … seven soppy cats, six cold hens, five glum quail, two plump guineapigs, one catatonic tortoise – and a mouse, running up and down a bay tree (and across the quail house roof, in through the eaves, between the lagging, and down the wire. No digging required. Little beast.)

So I chopped down the bay tree. Merry Christmas.

And fraternal greetings to your turkeys.

Quail Diary – 64. Snow

Oops. Spoke too soon. Water in the quail run froze overnight. Minus 2C at 2am and snow by breakfast. Brrr. When I went down to feed the quail, they were shacked up in a heap in the thick straw with the mouse, a row of unblinking black eyes, feathers fluffed and refusing to budge. The book says they like 16C. Well, it isn’t. Try Mallorca. In London, the thermometer in the run reads firmly 0C by day, except for the hour I spent lagging and boarding the roof, when it shot up five degrees. (Ergh …) The quail shed their mufflers and pottered at my boots for the duration, basking in my exertions, happily dodging dropped hammers and occasional ironmongery. Even the mouse popped up, scampering along the wire (inside the plastic) whistling in a casual sort of way. If he’d had a cane, he’d have been twirling it. Tomorrow I double-glaze. “It won’t do any good,” says Himself. “It’s winter. They’re birds.” “You’re not thinking of bringing them indoors, are you?” says Senior Teen, looking pained.  Certainly not. They’d  get eaten – if not by the cats, then the neighbours. Christmas. Brr, humbug.