A Quail Tale

When I lasted posted, I had given up on the quail eggs. It was Tuesday, three days after they were due to hatch and I was depressed that despite the signs of life when candled and despite my faithfully turning of eggs, nothing had happened. I didn't know why, whether it was too cold outside the incubator or whether I had got the humidity wrong but I had given up and decided to have a rest from trying to hatch eggs and possibly think about buying a more sophisticated incubator.
So you can imagine my shock when lying in bed on Tuesday night, I heard a loud chirping in the room. I shot out of bed and there was a chick in the incubator, unlike last year's chickens it had hatched cleanly and quickly and was already drying off and moving around. Although in retrospect I think it may have hatched a few hours earlier and because it had been quiet for a while I had just been unaware of its existence. I immediately got very excited and hoped for more to hatch overnight but in the morning there was just our il Sunday one and only chick looking pretty healthy and running around. We named her Una for obvious reasons.
By Wednesday night I had fixed up the brooding arrangements, a large plastic storage box under a heat lamp in the corner of the living room. I had intended to carry on rearing them in my bedroom but for one tiny chick, Una is pretty noisy. She looked very small and lost in the big box and I worried that if she got too cold  she would have no-one to cuddle up to. So I got on the phone and found a poultry breeder in Farsley who had some 10 day old quail chicks he would let me have for a pound each. He said he only had three though, I said this was fine as they were primarily company for Una. When I got there though he threw in (not literally) a fourth chick who had a damaged foot from birth, although he seems to get around fine on it. I have christened him Tim, after Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol. Tim and Una are both brown and stripey. Now that Una's baby feathers have fluffed up she really does look like a big bumble bee running around the brooder. The other three are Golden quails and I don't know what to call them, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail come to mind. The older quails are in a less attractive stage than Una of beginning to grow their adult feathers and are showing several bald patches.
The story is not finished there though as yesterday afternoon I was again stunned to hear cheeping from the incubator. Amazingly after five days and after I had stopped bothering to add water to the incubator, another chick had hatched. She didn't look as large or as active as Una (who is no longer the one and only) but she made it through the night.
I am going away to the beekeeping  convention now until Sunday (expect the next post to be full of bee news) but I shall leave the incubator switched on just in case.