Light for laying quail — day length, brightness and shade

For laying quail, light is not a comfort but the trigger for laying. Below ten hours of day length the body puts reproduction on hold; from fourteen hours the laying performance runs, and seventeen hours is considered the optimum. The second figure matters just as much, and hardly anyone thinks of it: too bright is as harmful as too short. Thirty to forty lux is enough — glaring light makes quail permanently nervous and costs birds.

Day length

Quail go by the light, not by the calendar. If the day becomes too short, the body winds down laying — that is not a fault but the built-in rule by which birds place their brood in the warm season. In keeping, that means:

So the working range lies between fourteen and seventeen hours. More is not better: a flock that barely gets any darkness finds no rest, and rest belongs to laying as much as feed does.

In practice, for a household flock: a timer, a fixed rhythm, and the autumn extension in good time — not once performance has already collapsed. Extending the day in the morning has the advantage that the birds settle down with the natural light in the evening, instead of sitting in the dark the moment the lamp switches off.

Brightness

The second figure is overlooked more often than the first. High illuminance is undesirable for quail: it is a permanent strain and increases losses in the flock. Thirty to forty lux is regarded as a good range.

That is little — considerably less than an ordinary ceiling lamp delivers in a living room, and about as much as subdued task lighting or an overcast day behind a window. If you have no way of measuring it, go by behaviour: a flock in the right light is calm and busies itself with feed and bedding. A flock in light that is too glaring is restless, easily startled and starts to peck — and feather pecking is the beginning of worse things in quail.

Shade belongs with it

Every quail needs a place where it is not sitting in the light. In cage keeping that means the top of the cage is covered with opaque material, above all on the top tier, which otherwise looks straight into the lamp. Part of the cage stays shaded that way, and the birds can withdraw from the lighting when they want to.

What comes from the side matters just as much. Direct rays of light falling across the cage are a source of stress in their own right — which is why cages do not stand by a window or next to another strong light source. So when you set up housing, plan light twice: once as a quantity and once as a direction.

The same principle applies in floor keeping, only by other means: a covered corner, a board over part of the area, a denser bedded corner. Quail are ground birds and users of cover; a flock without any shaded spot sits permanently in the open.

Young birds have a different programme

What applies to the laying flock does not apply to rearing. Chicks get light around the clock for the first days, so they can find feed and water at any time. After that it comes down to ten to twelve hours, and stays there until about the fifth week; in cages the change is possible from the second week of life.

The reason is exactly the one for which the laying flock gets fourteen hours: light steers sexual maturity. Young birds that see long days too early come into lay too early — ahead of a body that is not ready. So the short days of rearing are not an economy measure but a deliberate brake.

Switching to the adult programme belongs with the move into laying housing, and that comes before the onset of lay — in quail at around 36 to 46 days of age.

What this means day to day

Three moves cover most of it. First, a timer that switches on earlier in winter mornings so the flock reaches fourteen to seventeen hours. Second, a lamp that lights the room evenly and softly instead of producing one bright patch and dark corners. Third, a shaded area in every cage or every pen.

And one observation no technology replaces: a flock whose performance falls off for no visible reason often has a light problem that crept in over weeks — a failed lamp, a timer knocked out of setting, a summer coming to an end. Before you change the feed, look at the light; it is the easier building site.

The figures and reference values in this article follow the specialist literature on quail keeping — Stele, Osmanyan, Afanasyev, "Egg production in poultry keeping", chapter on the technology of quail egg production.