Breeding quail — choosing parent birds and running separate lines

Breeding means selecting, not multiplying. Keep whatever happens to be left over from each hatch and after a few years you have a flock that lays worse than the stock you started with — not because anything went wrong, but because nothing was ever decided. At its core, breeding consists of three steps: you decide what you are selecting for, you consistently keep only birds that match that goal, and you write down where every batch came from.

Everything else here is the execution of those three sentences.

What you select for — in this order

The order matters more than the list. Traits further down are only looked at once the ones above them are right.

1. Health and vitality. A bird that has never stood out, came through

rearing well, has clean plumage and clear eyes and eats normally is the starting point. Birds that are repeatedly unwell do not belong in the breeding group, however much you like everything else about them. Where a disease is going round the flock, that is a question for the vet and not one for breeding selection.

1. Laying performance. Not that of a single day, but the course over

weeks: an early, even start of lay, few pauses, no early drop. In group housing, performance can rarely be assigned to the individual bird — then you simply select the group instead and keep the offspring of the better group.

1. Egg size and shell. Even eggs with a firm shell. Very large eggs are no

goal in themselves; they more often go together with thinner shells, more breakage and more laying problems.

1. Weight and build. The main trait for meat lines, a secondary one for

laying lines. Very heavy hens often lay less.

1. Calmness and temperament. Birds that do not shoot up the moment you

step in injure themselves on the lid less often, lay more reliably and make the daily work easier. The trait is underrated and is influenced by heredity.

The age of the parent birds and the window for hatching eggs

A bird is sexually mature long before it is a usable breeding bird. The first eggs of a young hen are small, irregular and hatch badly; in practice, usable hatching eggs only come some weeks after the start of lay, once size and rhythm have become stable.

At the other end stands fertility. In older cocks it falls, and with it the hatch rate, while the hen still carries on laying quite decently. The usable window for hatching eggs therefore lies in practice roughly between the third or fourth month of life and the end of the first laying period, with the best result in the first months after that. If you go on breeding from the same parent birds for longer, you should record the hatch rates — they show the decline before you suspect it.

Putting the breeding group together

A breeding group is not a living arrangement: it is put together for a purpose and then left alone.

• One cock per group. Two cocks in a small space mean fighting, feather

loss and unrest, and assigning the offspring becomes impossible.

• The ratio. A breeding group is run tighter than a pure laying flock:

there, three to five hens per cock is usual, in the breeding group more like two to four. The reason is the purpose — in the laying flock the number of eggs counts, in the breeding group what counts is that they are fertile. Too few hens mean overworked birds with bare necks and backs; too many mean infertile eggs. You can see both: the one on the plumage, the other at candling.

• Time before collecting. After putting the group together, a few days pass

before the eggs are reliably fertile. Only collect hatching eggs after that, or you will throw half the first batch away.

• Quiet. Every move costs laying performance and fertility. A breeding

group is formed once and then not rearranged again.

Relatedness and what inbreeding does

Inbreeding means nothing other than that the parents are closer relatives — the closer, the stronger. The effect is neither chance nor bad luck but arithmetic: with every pairing among relatives, the share of traits a bird carries twice over rises. That holds for desirable traits just as much as for undesirable ones — it is only the undesirable ones that get noticed.

In small flocks relatedness is reached quickly, because anyone who raises two or three generations from a single purchased group will at some point pair siblings with siblings without noticing. What then happens step by step is always the same picture and is called "inbreeding depression": poorer fertility, falling hatch rates, more chicks that die late in incubation, smaller and less resilient young birds, slower development. It rarely comes as a collapse, usually as a slight decline over several generations — and that is exactly why it is so often put down to other causes.

A single brother-to-sister pairing is no catastrophe; breeding programmes work with it deliberately in order to make traits visible. Continued uncontrolled over years, it is the most common reason why a flock "just doesn't want to any more".

Separate lines and buying in

The simplest way out is not arithmetic but organisation.

• Run two or three separate lines. Each line is bred on for itself, and for

the next generation you cross between the lines. That keeps diversity without your having to work out degrees of relatedness. The condition is that the lines really do stay separate — in separate compartments and with separately labelled hatching eggs.

• Buy in outside genetics regularly. A new cock from another flock every

few generations is usually enough. Buy from the breeder, not at the market, ask about origin and age, and settle new birds in separately and under observation before they join the flock.

• Swap rather than buy. Among keepers in the area, swapping a cock often

works better and is cheaper than any purchase.

Records

Without a note of origin for each batch, breeding is guesswork after two generations. You will see that the hatch rate is falling, but you can no longer say which group the birds that do badly came from — and with that, any selection is void.

It does not take much. Per batch these are enough: date, parent group or line, number of eggs set, number of chicks hatched, losses in the first two weeks, and a note about the purchase if an outside bird was involved. Plus the number of eggs per week for each group. Keep the labels simple enough that they still make sense in a year's time, and label the eggs themselves, not just the tray they lie in.

If you record origin and figures for each batch right when you set the eggs, after two generations you have a basis instead of a memory — that is what this application is built for.