More Birdie Drama...

Last week there was all kinds of drama involving our quail hatchlings, so this week the grown-up birds decided to raise a ruckus.

We've had a small flock of Japanese quail for almost three years. We are down to five now, the two chicks and a threesome of adults. Buddy and his two girlfriends usually get along just fine, however, once or twice a year, the girls try to murder Buddy. They are pretty savage about it, and honestly I have lost more birds to quail on quail violence than any other cause. Generally I just remove Buddy for a couple of days and when I put him back everyone gets along as though nothing has happened.

That didn't work this time. This time when Buddy was reintroduced, the attacks commenced immediately. It took me several minutes to figure out that the girls didn't want Buddy around because they were broody. Well, one of them was broody, and her sister was going to defend her to the death. This turn of events was astounding to me because quail very rarely go broody. Like never. But there she was, trying to spread her body out to cover eight tiny eggs. It looked so cute, I didn't have the heart to take them away from her. I figured "what the Hell", and let her try to hatch her own babies for once in her life. The main problem with this scenario was that her sister was not broody and therefore kept on laying a tiny (and without Buddy, infertile) egg every day, one that the wanna-be mama gathered up under her fluffy breast to be set upon. As you can imagine, this was a hilarious sight albeit a losing proposition. I doubted any of those few fertile eggs would ever be properly incubated but I let her set on them anyway because, hey, you never know. But yeah, none of them hatched.

After a few days I tried to put Buddy back with his harem. Unfortunately, he was no longer welcome and now the poor guy lives all by himself, next door to his former lovers and BFFs. So sad! He used to pick the choice crumbles out of the feeder and set them on the ground for the girls to eat. He was such a good mate & I bet they just took him for granted.