HOW TO “BUTTERFLY” A QUAIL BACKYARD FARMER STYLE ( not for the squeamish )

For various reasons I have to slaughter some quail from time to time. I may have too many males, it may be necessary to introduce new blood in to the breeding pens, hens may stop laying, and so on. My method of preparing quail for the pot has evolved through experience and may be useful to someone. I would like to know how others approach this fairly unpleasant task!

Line a 20 Liter bucket with a black garbage bag and after decapitating the quail with a meat cleaver, hold the bird over the open bag to let it bleed. Hold the wings to prevent them from fluttering and splashing blood. After about one minute tie a piece of soft wire around one leg and hook it over the side of the bucket, letting the bird hang inside the bucket, to let it bleed into the bag. Submerge the bird in scalding water for ten second then immediately pluck all the feathers until the carcass is clean. Cut the feet off by cutting through the shank close to the hock joint – (foot side of the joint). If you cut through the joint the meat retracts from the thigh when cooking and exposes the bone.

Take a meat shear and insert from the back hard up against the backbone. Cut all along the backbone, keeping the inside tip of the shears close to the top, until you have cut through right to the front. Do the same to the other side of the backbone. If you keep your shears against the inside top, you would have missed all the entrails.

It is now easy to lift the neck and backbone from the carcass, starting from the neck side

Cut through the backbone as close to the cloaca as possible. Also cut through the skin immediately below the cloaca. The backbone / neck sections goes straight into the dish holding all the parts to cook stock from. By inserting your middle finger underneath the entrails, starting from the back and moving your hand forward keeping your finger against the breastbone you will lift all the entrails out, intact without soiling the carcass.

The only parts that may still be attached are the lungs – scrape these out and put into the stock dish. Cut the neck skin short and ad this to the stock dish.Wash the carcass and leave to dry a bit.

Carefully remove the gizzard and put into a separate dish for cleaning later. Also cut loose the proventriculus and hart which goes into the third dish. Make sure you identify the gall bladder and cut it loose from the liver without spilling gall onto the liver.

The liver then goes with the proventriculus and hart and also add the gizzard after cleaning to make wonderful quail liver dishes like risotto .

Butterflying your quails in this described way instead of cutting through the breastbone (from the front instead of the described way from the back) you retain the moisture in the breast much better during cooking. No damage is done to any of the expensive cuts either. The backbone, which is always difficult to eat and does not have much meat makes great quail stock.

There are many wonderful Quail Recipes

QUAILS IGNORE WEATHERMAN

There was a lot of conversation. especially on Facebook, as to the possible effect on hatchability of poultry eggs when heavy thunder is experienced during incubation. During the second half of December Dunedin experienced very heavy weather with lots of thunder, especially in North East Valley. During this time I had a batch of 120 Quail eggs in the incubator, which hatched on 4 January and the results are that I had 57% live birds at 17 days old of all eggs placed. This compared with the running average for the year of 59% is a negligible difference and disproves the theory that heavy weather effects hatchability. It may be small numbers to be statistically significant and the weather may not have been bad enough (I would hate to experience more severe storms), but at least I have some results. Will continue to monitor this in future.

Fresh Quail Eggs

I sell fresh Quail Eggs ever Sunday at the Dunedin Stadium Markets

Quail Eggs the healthy and tasty alternative

One Dozen Packed Eggs

Getting Ready for the Markets

Lethal Homozygous (Y) Gene in Coturnix Quail

This short reply was written by me as result of a Facebook discussionll my life, not only in breeding my own animals but also when involved in establishing new cattle and horse breeds in the past, as well as advising Governments, large International Organisations and many thousands of Farmers around the world. I breed with poultry as they come out of the egg, without having to interfere with them to be able to survive and breed. I select and cull heavily, especially when the gene pool is as limited as it is in New Zealand for the breeds I am interested in. As for the Lethal homozygous Y gene associated with Golden Italian Quails, I failed to have read any article reporting hatchability between strains under the same commercial conditions and report on comparable results, nor have I found any reputable body advising to never breed Golden Quails to Golden Quails. In my own case, over a period of three months, using 480 quail hatching eggs (120 from each of the four strains I breed at present – All purebred) I quote the following results for animals alive after 24 hours of terminating the hatch : Golden Italian – 74.3 % (Variation 66.7 % to 83.1 %) ; Tibetan – 83.2 % (Variation 79.1 % – 90.0 %) ; Pharoah 75.0% (Variation 73.3 % – 76.7 %) and White – 68.9 % (Variation 56.7 % – 76.7%). I do not for one moment doubt the work that has been done in identifying and mapping the genetics of the Golden Italian Quail, but clearly there is more to it than say you have 25% embryo mortality and that is it. As an example there exist a plumage color mutation Yt2 that is dominant over the yellow (Y) gene and produce fawn or yellow birds almost exactly like the heterezygous Y, but is not lethal. There are also many other malformations and abnormalities controlled by one or few genes, as well as many other lethal genes in Quails. I am aware of a number of commercial operations using purebred Golden Italian strains of Coturnix coturnix japonica with great success. There are also some reports quoting 100% hatchability in purebred Golden Italian strains of quail. Any poultry will experience embryo mortality at some level and the results I have achieved with Golden Italians prove that I am on the right track and there is no real difference at present with the strains available to me in New Zealand. Inbreeding, indiscriminate breeding and failure to identify and eliminate hereditary defects are doing the damage to poultry breeds in New Zealand. I am also not against breeding fancy breeds – it is a lot of fun, but do it sensibly.

Inside the mind of a Quail

QUAIL WATER DRINKERS

I am a minimalist and like to use whatever is on hand, but won’t compromise on efficiency and quality of the end product. Plastic is definitely not my favorite material, but in today’s life you cannot avoid it, so why not use it and save it from landing in the garbage bin and become part of the world wastage problem. I use an old plastic milk and peanut butter bottle to make a very effective quail water drinker FOR FREE and in the process drastically reduced my carbon footprint.

Knowing quail babies love to climb on and into everything and during the first few days are very clumsy and petite, I used this knowledge to make a quail water drinker that encourages the little quails in the beginning to climb into the drinker to make water consumption easy, without being able to drown, get wet or get stuck in a corner. When they are a few weeks old and know their way around the brooder and eat and drink freely, I switch to a drinker that they cannot get into and spoil or soil the water.

Use a milk bottle and cut a large enough hole into both sides so the baby quails can freely enter and exit. Place a piece of wire netting (leftover from the last cage you built) inside to fit well with the sides turned slightly down so the netting is about 5 mm off the bottom of the bottle. Fill with water until the water touches the netting and you are ready. Cut the top off the milk bottle to make cleaning easy.

This will encourage the little quails to enter without any risk of drowning or getting wet.

Drinking made easy

When the quails are about two weeks old, I switch to adult Drinkers

Take used Milk and Peanut Butter Bottles. Any other bottle will work as long as it fits tightly inside the milk bottle. Cut off the top of the milk bottle. Cut a oval hole in the side small enough so a quail cannot enter it’s body, but large enough it can poke it’s head through – about a 30 mm opening and about 50 mm off the bottom.