Our Quail
At Canterbury Quail Farm, we take pride in our meticulous breeding program. We believe everyone who raises quail should partake in responsible breeding practices, which start with a solid understanding of your new birds background. Therefore, we have created this directory to start your record keeping off right.
Breeding responsibly requires the utilization of various methods, so we have broken down our directory into two categories, Coveys and Roosters.
A single rooster with 4 hens (4:1 ratio) seems to provide the best balance of the following key factors; fertility, socialization, and hostility. So, even though a 1:1 ration would give us perfect control and linage documentation, we have found it comes at a high price. Quail are social and do not like to be isolated to just a single roommate. Additionally, roosters can be quite enthusiastic, which can be somewhat exhausting for just a single hen. Therefore, after much experimentation with everything from a 1:1 ration, up to a 1:8, we have determined that 1:4 offers the greatest balance of health and comfort while still providing reasonable fertility rates.
For this reason, we make sure that once a covey of hens is formed, they will remain together for the entirety of their reproductive years. This ensures that every egg collected from this pen can be tracked to one of only four hen possibilities, which will always be from the same background because they are all daughters of the same covey. Thus, each new covey will be a continuation of the same female bloodline.
It is our roosters who are then rotated between our various covies to ensure that