How to check fertility on Coturnix Quail cage sets - winter breeding tips

Hi & Welcome to Tully River Quail Co.
We like to give our "working" (breeder) hens a break in October by allowing the natural lighting to follow the sun as the daylight shortens. We give them a month off at the beginning of the fall season as their energy (from feed) is more useful for them to re-feather or get their "winter coat". Some birds will actually molt and lose feathers on their back and grow new fresh feathers as the prepare for the cold winter months. Also, by shutting down the breeding drive of the males, the hens can recover that back of the neck patch that often becomes denuded during active (over active or "less gentile") breeding activities ... "making the sex" as my Italian friends say.
So we give the Quail coop a chance to recoup.
in November, we start our breeding program back up as we have sold all of our stock that we planned for during the shutdown and the orders are still coming in.
When restarting your winter breeding program, you will adjust the lighted hours to 14-16 hours. in our latitude, we have out timer to extend the daylight by 3 hours. we bring this back up slowly, over a few days, first 1 hour, then 2, to finally our 3 day setting over about a week to 10 day period. Quail don't like changes in their routine so we consider this in our artificial daylight scheme.
After 2 weeks, you will start to get eggs. maybe 1 the first day, 2 the second, then 4, and within another week or two your back up to %80-%90 production. During these 2 weeks you have to consider that not only are the hens starting to get fooled by the fake daylight, but so are the roos. the first few batches over this 2 week restart, you will most likely have a very poor fertility rate. eggs from this transition period rarely hatch. The boys aren't interested yet.
One way we use to check each cage sets fertility rate is to number the harvested eggs in association with the cage or Breeder set they came from. At Tully River, we have a cage row of 6 divided cages shown in this video. each cage is numbered 1-6 and each side is A or B. Using a sharpie marker, we mark each egg with the appropriate cage number they came from on the Round end. although we've never experienced any fertility drop when using a marker on our eggs, we still like to mark the Air Space or larger rounded end of the egg... just in case. it minimizes the potential contact of the marker juice with the developing embryo IMHO.
we rotate the marker colors Red -Blue-Black each day until we collect enough eggs for a tray load... 120 eggs or 4-5 days. This is just an added consideration so we can make sure we don't wait longer than 6 days to set.
On a note pad, we use hash marks to number how many eggs we are setting from each cage section, 1A to 6B in this example. When we are ready to set the eggs, we total the hash marks for our Total Set and we also track our DNC#'s (did not candle) prior to lockdown, finally calculating our total hatch rate when the babies come. this allows us to identify problems in a particular cage or section in which we might need to consider swapping out a new rooster as variety is the spice of life, and a spicy rooster fertilizes mo'eggs.
Winter Hatching can be as successful as Spring hatches if you think like a quail and take the time to understand why you may be having failure.
one other thing to note: if you incubate in a garage or non climate controlled workshop, you may want to check the calibration of your incubator. it's not a bad idea to do this periodically, but we recommend you at least verify your controller's readings during seasonal changes. what may be 99.5 in summer may be 97.5 in the winter. Also note that over time, the sensors of your controller may become less accurate... especially if you do not use distilled water for your humidity tank... small amounts of calcification can build up and throw your readings off. clean these with vinegar between hatches or when you do routine maintenance on your incubator... it helps maintain the accuracy. As long as you know how much you are off, you can either do the math in your head, go by a second/third alt thermometer/sensor, or many better controllers have a mode that allows you to recalibrate your sensor. we recently posted a video on recalibration of the Lilytech ZL7901A but the idea is the same, one you determine the setting code in your controller manual.
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