Quail diary – 58. And then there were five

Nugget is dead now, too. And – again – I killed her, poor little quail. It happened a week ago, only this time it was so horrible I haven’t wanted to write. There was blood. The goitre suddenly doubled in size and ruptured, spilling intestines. I think it was some kind of hernia. I had to act swiftly but my hands were shaking so badly I bodged it. Poor, poor Nugget. Sometimes a person’s best simply isn’t good enough. I haven’t slept much since.

I don’t want to keep birds any more.

Quail diary – 57. Some like it hotter

One egg today! First since Monday, so my draught-proofing efforts have evidently paid off. The run, swaddled in clear sheeting, now looks like a plastic yurt at the bottom of the garden, but the quail are still cold. The new greenhouse thermometer – dangling out of reach by the door because they disabled the old one by shoving a leaf up it (no, I don’t know how either) – reads 7C at daybreak. The quail have taken to their beds; six little brown humps, unmoving in the pile of straw. Yes, it’s that time of year again. The straw is down. Thick and expensive.

Nugget still has her ‘udder’ goitre dangling by her knees, still pink – if now somewhat splodged with dung, and I still don’t know what it is; Glenda has somehow lost almost half her feathers, ditto; and they are all off their food. Dandelions wither untouched in the litter, as six little bodies huddle together, grumpily fluffed out over their cold toes, ignoring their nice layers’ pellets, and even picking listlessly at the quail seed mix – only eating the black ones.

It is cold out of the sun by the shed. And it’s only mid October. Up at the house, a genteel struggle is already being waged over the central heating. Junior Teen and I want it off (“It’s only October” … “Save the planet”) while Himself and Senior Teen say “sod global warming, the place is freezing”. So far it has remained off, though Himself, a man of few words (“Because he can’t get any in edgeways,” mutters a colleague) has quietly switched on a portable oil heater. Senior Teen hasn’t noticed, and spends most of her study leave in her room, wrapped in her duvet. Oh, put on a jumper. Do.

But the quail really are cold, and staring sadly through the wire at the sunny garden. Could I make them tiny woollies out of stray socks? There’s always a pile widowed by the washing machine. Should I move them nearer the house? Why didn’t I build the run on runners? Or could I reflect the sunlight back into the hutch by putting mirrors along the fence? Watch this space. Meanwhile, I’ve ordered a solar-powered shed light. It won’t make the quail any warmer, but it might cheer them up – if only because the movement sensor will scare the crap out of the foxes.

Quail diary – 56. Full cylinder jacket

The quail are cold, and bored. It is only October, but the afternoon sunlight no longer stretches into their corner by the shed. This time last year they were in low-rent accommodation outside the french windows, on the patch of scorched earth that may one day be a patio - a row of ankle-high noseyparkers watching us watching them through the glass. They were there, wide awake, when I got in at night, and back by the wire, beady eyes peeled, when the kitchen lights snapped on again at 6am. So much to see. They made friends with the robins and blackbirds, and briefly acquired a small furry lodger, until I evicted it.

These days, the only show in town is a daft cat chasing flies across the warm grass, or fishing with one paw through the corrugations in their new posh roof. The wild birds are long gone. Even the fox doesn’t mooch by any more since we mended the fence. The quail stand glumly by the wire, in the shade. Occasionally there’s a little half-hearted dustbathing, but it lacks conviction. It’s been a busy summer, 740 eggs since March, and they are looking bedraggled and end-of-season, like seaside landladies still cooking full English breakfasts in their sleep.

Quail hutch - lagged with cylinder jacket and drawing pins

Suddenly, Ouef is bald again, Glenda has lost her tail feathers, and Nugget has sprouted an udder-like bulge between her knees. It is pink and healthy looking, and doesn’t seem to bother her – or at least, not as much as me upending her and prodding it does – so I’m letting well alone. (“Murdered any more of ‘em?” was Chris P Byrd’s first question when she got back from her Greek island.) They are still laying two eggs a day between six. But they look like they need a holiday.

Ideally I’d move them back near the house, where they can watch our lives on a continuous loop like low budget daytime TV, but it would probably take me till next March to lay a second lot of foundations. And Himself might decamp into the shed in protest.

So instead a large red plastic banquette has appeared in the run, like  something out of a dodgy home makeover. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, eat your heart out. It is of course the hutch, newly lagged in a cheap and cheery hot water cylinder jacket, and stuffed with shredded paper. Glenda seems to love it and has taken up residence on a thick pile in one corner. Though whether that is because she feels the cold - or simply to stop the others ripping out her tail feathers, I cannot say.

If anyone knows of a solar-powered greenhouse heater, easily installed, not too dear, and animal friendly, I’m in the shed, snuggled up on my new banquette.

Quail diary – 55. So shall ye reap

Sunday brunch with quail eggs and the works

There’s a nip in the air at 6am, and the apple tree – usually groaning with pie-sized cookers at this time of year – is empty, knocked for six by an overdue pruning. Next year will be business as usual. For now, the raspberries are luscious and the runner beans abundant. Cherries, blackcurrants, blueberries, lettuces, potatoes are all long gone. We’ve passed the equinox and the quail are starting to slow down too. Two eggs today, though sunset may bring another. We found four yesterday, bringing the tally for the year to 728. Even the Stakhanovite bantams have their feet up this week, moulting. (Their output is so vast, Bantam Neighbour doesn’t bother to keep count.)

On our side of the fence, the family is revolting. The Teens won’t touch quail eggs any more [and larks' tongues are so last season...] To be fair, we have had them with everything all summer: from teeny weeny fried ones, like something out of a dolls’ house, to my favourite – poached, with fresh asparagus, Parma ham and pancakes. In between lie plates of boiled, canaped, scrambled and pickled quail eggs. We’ve had them as omelettes, sandwich fillings, hors d’oeuvres; breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Everyone who’s stepped over the threshold has been fed quail eggs. I’ve given them away by the dozen. And still they come. This time last year I was worrying about solar lighting to extend the season. Now I understand the point of winter.

Poached quail eggs, with asparagus, Parma ham and pancake. Yum

Yet we live in a strangely sanitised world, when it comes to food. Hands-on experience of animal husbandry has turned Junior Teen vegetarian and left Senior Teen determined that nothing passed hot and hard through a bird’s bum will ever again pass her lips. Even Himself – a dedicated follower of J. Oliver and N. Slater - would rather buy his gourmet ingredients in plastic trays from the supermarket than risk an encounter with snails, blackfly or homemade compost.

Little Brother, happily buzzing round and round his garden on his new, toy tractor, is still overrun with bunnies he can’t bring himself to shoot. Yet Toothless Granny, a former Landgirl, is blithely bumping off grey squirrels. “They’re an official pest,” she says firmly. She traps ‘em, a neighbour shoots them, and the plump little corpses go to a mutual friend who cooks and eats them. She’s clocked up six so far this year. No messing.

After Dick’s death many people commented how their grannies – (why was it always their granny?) – used to wring the hens’ necks when they were little. So what changed? Even Bantam Neighbour, my font of all things fowl, admitted that when she’d had a sick hen to put out of its suffering, she had not infact managed to do the deed – despite laying the poor creature out across three sticks as prescribed. When it fixed her with its dying eye, she’d bottled out – and nipped across the road to the local farmer’s market, to recruit an assassin there instead … heroic blag.

When did our food start to grow on shelves? And why, if we are so reluctant to kill, are we so careless about wasting what someone else has killed for us? That bean you’ve just scraped off your plate into the bin was watered and watched over and protected from pests by someone, and – at the risk of sounding like my mother – something died for that scrap of bacon or uneaten pie.

Maybe “doing lunch” should be on the national curriculum.

*

Meanwhile, I have started to lag the hutch with sheets of clear plastic. The dappled shade beside the tool shed was perfect for summer, but already the afternoon sun barely reaches the quail dustbathing optimistically in a heap at the wire, nearest the light. The cats think its a game. Winter’s coming.

Quail diary – 54. A year in quail

The quail, feeding time

Two coops, 682 eggs, a lorry load of dandelions, and one death. It feels like yesterday, but it is a year since seven pairs of ankle-high black eyes shot out of a cardboard box into our lives.

I have learned so much, and not just about the fierce dinosaur descendants who live, like the secretive “little folk” of yore, at the bottoms of our gardens as domestic fowl. The quail – pootling quietly in their run, scattering seed and nesting materials – attracted visitors from the get go, and not just mice. Meeting the robins and other wild things I’ve previously hardly noticed peeping from the hedges and ducking out behind the shed, learning their calls and watching their lives – and deaths – unfold, has been entrancing. Enriching.

Similarly, we have been delighted by the foxes, who sniff around the hutch and stay to watch the quail ignoring them. I could do without the smelly dollops of poo, and the trail of chewed balls, socks and odd shoes, but it is a small price for that patch of orange curled up snoozing under the lavender. Even the rats spying on my plump chums from under next door’s patio have provided a certain teeth-gritted challenge.

I have spent £355 and many happy hours, boshing bits of wood and wire together, digging foundations, learning to lay bricks. (And nearly losing a thumb to a Stanley blade cutting corrugated roof felt). I’ve learned about animal safe, low-emission paints – and will never again use anything else. I’ve built two runs; both perfectly acceptable to the quail, and learned that however desirable it may be to keep the little blighters in knee-high accommodation (they can explode upwards, as high as a house) it is a damn sight easier to handle them and clean them if you don’t.

Above all, I have learned about light. If Senior Teen’s very first weedy runner bean introduced us to the seasons, and the joys of growing our own veg, the quail have given me the equinoxes, dandelions and the quaint comfort of cuddling a feathery handful with warm feet.

Thank you, quail.

Quail diary – 53. Birds of a feather

Bob White quail - with holes in back for cocktail sticks jammed with cheese cubes, pineapple and pickled onions

As a child (let it be said softly) I collected stamps, and Beswick china foals that would have been worth hanging on to, and – embarrassed shuffle – cute 4 inch “Dolly Darlings“, for which I hoarded and counted and recounted my weekly sixpence pocket money in the mid 1960s, and which are themselves now showing up on collectors’ websites. In later life I acquired a curiously impressive library of vanity published seamen’s memoirs culled from secondhand book shops – and latterly a convoy of tiny waterline merchant ships that sails across the wall behind my desk, found online at vast expense. Thank goodness we didn’t have the internet when I was a kid.

But now, of course, we do have the internet, and eBay, and now it’s the quails’ turn. Yup, quailish memorabilia is starting to fill the remaining few gaps on my shelves. It began with the Furnivals brown quail sugar bowl that circulates among the neighbours with eggs. (“Well, at least you rotate your obsessions,” commented my boss, at the hiss of delight when my bid won one night. A bargain at £2.) More bizarrely, there’s also the Red Wing china quail “cocktail” server, which I bought for 99p and which sits gathering dust on top of the kitchen cupboard. (“You were had,” said Himself). Turns out Red Wing is quite desirable in the US. (“You were still had…”)

All I wanted was a mug with a picture of a quail on, to drink my tea out of. Now I find myself with a bookmark bar of sites offering anything from notelets and T-shirts to clocks, all adorned with drawings of or photos of, or slogans pertaining to, quail. And I’ve spotted the £130 Royal Crown Derby quail paperweight …

Come back, Dolly Darlings, all is forgiven.

Quail diary – 52. Red in tooth and claw

One of the kittens caught his first mouse today! Cowering behind the flower pot beside the quail hutch. Jippeee. I knew they were climbing up the wire. Junior Teen is distraught. “It was squeaking, Mum…” She paces the garden until the poor thing is dispatched, eventually. Cats are so cruel. Still, hopefully young Nox will have got a taste for it – particularly now he no longer needs helping down off the fence … Price of mice £500; price of eggs 49p. Go quail.

Quail diary – 51. We are seven*

The quail hutch with added predators - kittens on the loose. No small furry things for miles around

The quail are happy again. Even as mornings turn chilly and nights start to creep in, the egg count is back up. Late each afternoon as the last of the sun filters through the wire, there are five or sometimes six little warm offerings dotted around the run: three in a nest of shredded paper in the corner, one in the shady passage behind the hutch, one in a whorl of straw beside the door, and sometimes one randomly out in the open between the water and wherever I’m likely to put my feet; no pretence at a nest, the egg just lies dustily where it dropped.

Working in the garden at the end of the day I often hear the whistle that tells me to go and look for a new egg. The call is very distinctive,  triumphant (or relieved?), a bit like air leaking from a balloon. And there in one of the hollows will be a fluffled up quail, bum skywards, with a queue waiting for her place, plaiting their legs and prodding her with their beaks like a row of middleaged theatre-goers checking loo doors at the interval.

Six eggs from six quail is pretty amazing at this time of year. Daylight is down to 13 hours and 8 minutes. By 12 hours they’ll stop, but it was only a month ago that they were averaging barely two eggs a day. Bizarrely, touchingly, the rate shot up as soon as poor Dick was out of her misery.

I didn’t eat her, for those of you who asked. She’s buried just beyond the wire, near the corner with the breeze block where she liked to stand. I haven’t seen any of the others up there. They have different favourite spots. I still believe I did the right thing, killing her, and I know now I could do it again.

And that I may have to. (“Only six to go,” said Chris P Byrd, when I told her.) Next time I’ll be prepared, with a bottle of chloroform or ether, so at least they won’t know when I’m wringing their necks. (“Go on, leave it in the bathroom cabinet,” said Chris P, wickedly. “That should worry the family…”)

Thank you for the many of you who sent messages of support. Yes, it’s rather put me off animal husbandry, too. But meanwhile – 630 eggs!

*With apologies to William Wordsworth

Quail diary – 50. The short, happy life of a quail … Dick in pictures

September 2008: The seven quail leaped out of their cardboard carrier, and hurled themselves into the cool earth – utterly ignoring Junior Teen

So there they were, seven identically small brown Tom, Dick and Harrys … I couldn’t tell them apart. The names just stuck

Eventually I thought of buying some leg rings. Doh! Dick was black

October 2008: Still no eggs, and I begin to wonder … Dick’s plumage is ambiguously unmottled

On Boxing Day 2008, Dick joined the family in the kitchen, to be dried off and cuddled warm again following removal of a dung ball from one toe. But I still chickened out of a gender inspection

At long last, in March 2009, all seven stopped dossing about and began to lay eggs. 611 of them, by now. Delicious. Thank you, girls!

Sometimes Dick was quarrelsome. But mainly I’ll remember her jumping up and down at my ankles for worms, and ripping into piles of dandelions, which she loved

And in the end, she died where she’d lived – with the covey dozing, bickering and dust bathing around her. August 2009

Quail diary – 49. Death

Dick is dead and I killed her. Just now.

I feel sick. I hope I did it right. I googled for advice and wrung her neck. Not as easy as you might think. Hand around body, head between third and middle fingers, pull and twist. “Not too suddenly or you’ll pull the head off…” She still twitched and flung out her legs. I jibbed at the advice to snip her head off with the shears, to make sure, but I did it three times over instead, just in case, in the pitch black in the run by torchlight after three glasses of wine. Dutch courage. The other quail didn’t turn a feather. Dick just lay on my knees, gasping for breath, drowning in gastric juices from her distended crop, the size of a satsuma by the end and hard. Yoghurt, massage and even liquid paraffin – freebie advice from the vet this afternoon. Thanks! – didn’t help. In the end I was just dripping water into her beak and trying to keep her warm.

I am not a natural killer. Extinguishing life is like snuffing a candle flame, I made up my mind and suddenly all that suffering was just a cold bundle of feathers. Afterwards, I arranged her in the flower pot where she’d enjoyed dustbathing (to keep her out of reach of the foxes and rats overnight) – and found myself having to “kill” her all over again, because she looked so lifelike. Well, it answers one question: I shall not be investing in an incubator. Killing a dying quail is bad enough. Killing healthy ones because they are surplus is quite another.

Perhaps killing the next one is easier.

I finally impressed the Teens.