The Wood Be Good Life: The Never Ending Quail Tail

In my last post I had left the quail in two hutches, Goldie and Una happily in one and Tim unhappily in the other. Despite laying an egg nearly every day, Una may not have been too happy, as over vigourous mating by Goldie had led to her developing a bald patch on the back of the head. Clearly both cages needed more females.
This was reinforced on Saturday when I had a complaint from a neighbour about the amount of noise Tim was making at night. Now a male quail doesn't crow like a rooster but he can let out a surprisingly loud and piercing cry at irritatingly irregular intervals, like having hiccups or listening to a leak dripping in the night, just when you think you can relax and go to sleep, he will do it again.
The complaint gave me the push to get on the phone and source some females. First I tried the elderly breeder I bought Tim and Goldie from in April. His son answered the phone, as his father was too distressed to answer any more calls from Asian males wanting groups of male quail only. Normally male quail are more difficult for a breeder to get rid of, as quail live most happily in a ratio of one male to two or more females. The fact that he had received four calls by Saturday lunchtime, all wanting males only, led him to believe that they were wanting to celebrate Eid by staging a cock fight and the idea sickened him to the point of handing the phone over to his son. In any case his quails were only a week old and too young for the sexes to be identified.
Eventually I found a poultry breeder near Penistone who had spare females, and I arranged to drive down on Sunday morning. Although the farm was only a few miles off the M1, it was well tucked away at the end of a mile long rough track which had me fearing for my car's suspension. It was lovely to pass a field of donkeys though, one of whom was feeding a foal. The farm was my kind of farm ie a bit ramshackle with nettles and brambles growing between the poultry sheds. It was an old stone-built Pennine farm and every stable and barn and outbuilding had been converted to hold poultry of some kind. In addition there were hutches with rabbits, two friendly dogs who came over to sniff us out and very cute kittens playing in the sunlight on the cobbled yard. The quail were kept in a fenced off area in a converted stable and Graham, the owner took my box and climbed into the cage amongst what seemed to be hundreds of quail and then rapidly checked for sex. All he was doing, was checking to see if they had a spotty breast (female) or a rust coloured breast (male) but he did it so quickly that I got the impression (untrue of course) that he was picking up handfuls of quail and throwing the discarded males over his shoulder.
I returned to Leeds, most satisfied with my box of five quail (the ever useful Wilson's Christmas hamper box of course) and introduced three of them to Tim.

I can say that Tim is no gentleman, without bothering to say welcome to the cage, he was on the first one like only a long frustrated quail can.
Happily we haven't heard a peep out of him since, and I went to bed pretty satisfied that my poultry problems were over and looking at interesting recipes for Chinese Pickled Quail's Eggs.
Unfortunately they weren't. The bald patch on the back of Una's head seemed to draw the attention of the two new females in her cage and they pecked at it overnight until it was a bloody mess this morning.