Cock or hen? How to tell male and female quail apart

In the widespread wild-coloured quail you can tell the sex from the plumage: hens carry dark speckles on a light breast, cocks an evenly rust-brown breast without that marking. This look only becomes reliable once the juvenile plumage has been replaced by the first proper feathering — in practice from about the fourth to sixth week of life. In single-coloured varieties the plumage fails completely; there it is the cock's call and, in practised hands, the vent check that decide.

From what age they can be told apart

Newly hatched chicks cannot be told apart with the naked eye. What looks like a difference in the first days of life is chance: chicks from the same hatch differ in size, in how far their feathers have grown and in how nimble they are. None of these features says anything about the sex.

The assessment becomes usable with the change of feathers. In many birds the first signs show from the third week; a flock can generally be judged reliably between the fourth and the sixth week. Until then sorting rarely pays off anyway: as long as the birds are growing up together and are not yet sexually mature, the mixed group does no harm.

If you absolutely need clarity earlier — because breeding groups have been ordered in advance, say, or because there is not enough room for two separate compartments — there is no way round a genetic test or a later re-check. Guessing helps nobody at this point.

The plumage — and where it fails

In wild-coloured quail, the most widespread colour variety, the breast is the decisive area. The hen shows clearly defined dark speckles or streaks on a light, often cream-coloured ground. The cock has an evenly rust-brown to cinnamon-coloured breast with at most a few light feather shafts scattered through it, but no speckled pattern. Many cocks also show a stronger marking on throat and cheek, which grows darker over the weeks.

Look at the bird in daylight and hold it calmly on your flat hand, rather than judging it in the cage from two metres away. A fluffed-up breast in half-light leads to wrong verdicts.

The same principle applies to other colour varieties, but more weakly: where the ground colour is lighter or darker overall, the contrast between speckles and background drops, and the assessment becomes a question of experience. It is entirely hopeless in single-coloured birds. In pure white quail there is no pigment at all for a marking; in uniformly dark ones the marking disappears into the ground colour. Nor does looking help with pied plumage, where the breast is wholly or partly white — there is simply no area left on which the speckles could show.

The most important sentence in this section is therefore: the plumage is not a general feature but a feature of particular colour varieties. If you keep a mixed flock, you will always need a second method for some of the birds.

The cock's call

The most reliable feature of all is the call, and it works in every colour variety. The cock calls loudly, harshly and in several syllables, mostly in short series and often from a standing position with the neck stretched out. Anyone who has heard the call once does not mistake it again. Hens are by no means silent, but they stay with quiet, soft sounds: trilling, short whistles, a rapid ticking when excited.

The drawback of this method is its timing. The calls only begin as sexual maturity sets in, in practice from about the fifth to the eighth week. And they are not a counter: a high-ranking cock calls a lot, lower-ranking ones in the same group can stay silent for days. So the number of cocks cannot be derived from the number of callers — but from one caller you can certainly derive that at least one cock is sitting there.

The vent check — a method for practised hands

Sexually mature cocks have a gland in the area of the vent that produces a whitish, foamy secretion. Under careful pressure on the edge of the vent this foam emerges. In hens it does not. That makes the check the only feature that works independently of colour variety and willingness to call.

It is at the same time the feature where the most can go wrong. Quail are small birds with thin bones and a sensitive abdomen; pressure on the body, hasty grabbing or a bird that throws itself out of your hand lead to injuries. If you use the check, then do it like this:

• Only on sexually mature birds. Before that the gland is not developed, and a

negative result means nothing at all.

• Hold the bird securely, but without pressure on breast and belly, the legs

guided between your fingers, over a soft surface.

• Only the area around the vent is felt gently. If you have to press, you are

doing something wrong.

• A few seconds, then put the bird back. If it becomes agitated, stop and repeat

later.

• Have the handling shown to you once by someone who has mastered it, rather

than teaching it to yourself on your own birds.

Incidentally, absent foam is weaker evidence than foam that is there: it can speak for a hen, but also for a bird that is not yet that far along or has just discharged. If a bird shows anything unusual in this area — swellings, sticky matting, blood — that is no longer a question of sexing, but one for the vet.

Behaviour in the group

If you watch every day, you often recognise cocks before you handle them. Cocks square up to each other, chase each other, jump up and settle their conflicts in short, violent clashes, mostly around head and neck. When treading they hold the hen by the neck — the typical consequence is bare patches on the neck and back of individual hens, and you see that trace even if you have never watched the act itself.

Behaviour is, however, an indication and not proof. Hens too assert rank, and in a pure group of hens one bird occasionally takes on behaviour that is ascribed to the cock. Take the behaviour as a reason to look more closely, not as a result.

What to do with the result

The point of the whole exercise is putting the groups together. For breeding one cock is put with several hens; in practice a range of about three to five hens per cock works well. Fewer hens means the individual hen is trodden too often and goes bare at the neck; considerably more hens means that part of the eggs stays unfertilised, which you notice when candling during incubation.

Groups are best left together as they are. Every move reorders the ranking, and the weeks that follow cost quiet and eggs.

Surplus cocks are the real problem with every hatch, because roughly as many cocks as hens are produced. If several sexually mature cocks sit within sight of the same hens, they fight, and these fights do not stop of their own accord: they end with injuries to the head, with birds kept away from the feed, and with restless hens that lay worse. If you want to keep surplus cocks, keep them separately and out of sight of the hens — and even that does not always work. The alternatives are passing them on or using them; what has to be observed in the way of registration, transport and sales rules is regulated differently by each federal state (Land) and district, and the binding information comes from the responsible veterinary office (Veterinäramt).

If you are recording your birds individually anyway, enter the sex at the first reliable finding and not earlier — a corrected entry is worthless if the breeding group has already been formed on the strength of it.