Quail Galore!

The incubator is running full steam ahead, with over 100 babies already hatched out! Most of them have gone to the freezer for feeder animals, but we have some in the brooder and even some out to new homes already!

This year is going to be really important for the farm. I'm finally wrapping up my wild type celadon project (I have all the girls, and I'm two steps from having the males!), which involved combining quail from six different bloodlines in five different states into one diverse, clean line of wild-feathered birds. These birds will be easily feather-sexable and lay a beautiful blue egg. Once I have them established, I intend to spend a little time quality-checking the eggs and birds, and then I'll be using them to clean out at least three other colors in celadon- fee, roux, and fawn. I may also create a sparkly fawn and roux fee celadon line. Once the rest are doing well, I intend to clean out my original celadon line to produce SLB-free tibetan celadons.

It's going to be a lot of work, but thankfully a lot of it can be done concurrently once I have the wild type celadon males. I will be selling project birds off and on all summer, but will hopefully be able to offer the wild types by midsummer.

Outside of the quail, the European violet ladies are growing out and I'll be repeating the breeding of Earl x Wendy/Heather again this year to produce a few more EV hens.

For the first time, I had enough extra plain-blue males to take them in for processing, and I'll be trying my first peacock for dinner in a few days! I'm pretty excited about it; while I have given a couple of temperament culls to others over my 16 years of breeding, I've never kept one for myself. So, hopefully it will be yummy!