HI! My name is Justine and along with my husband, Daniel I am raising Coturnix Quail and meat rabbits! Our main focus is on preserving the Silver Fox breed but we also have a New Zealand mix doe so that we could have experience raising more than just one breed of rabbit. We have had rabbits for about 9 months but just had our first kindling this morning! 1 stillborn and 5 healthy buns! I hope to learn more from you all, and share our passion for meat rabbits together in community!
Hey from VA!
- Thread starter Justy0
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Welcome, Justine! Congrats on getting started with bunnies, and welcome to the group! Let’s have some pics of your buns! 
Congratulations on your baby buns! Hopefully they will thrive, although it's pretty chancy with a first time mum bun. But, she's off to a good start so hopefully things will go well.
Which doe had the litter? Are they silver foxes? Are silver foxes born black and become silver later?
Which doe had the litter? Are they silver foxes? Are silver foxes born black and become silver later?
Rabbit Tree Farm
Well-known member
Welcome Justine. I am in VA as well.
I had a first time mom nz meat mutt that looks like a beatrix Potter drawing, kindle 4 weeks ago. She had 12 healthy babies. Over the next week we lost 7 of them to what appeared to be her pulling them out of the box and then they would chill. 3 of them we never found at all. We aren't sure what happened. If it was accidental, intentional or predatory.
However, the remaining 5 are the biggest, fattest, fastest growing babies I've seen. Part of me wonders if she just knew she couldn't raise all those babies.
I am also hoping to start quail in the spring. Are they as easy as everyone says?
I had a first time mom nz meat mutt that looks like a beatrix Potter drawing, kindle 4 weeks ago. She had 12 healthy babies. Over the next week we lost 7 of them to what appeared to be her pulling them out of the box and then they would chill. 3 of them we never found at all. We aren't sure what happened. If it was accidental, intentional or predatory.
However, the remaining 5 are the biggest, fattest, fastest growing babies I've seen. Part of me wonders if she just knew she couldn't raise all those babies.
I am also hoping to start quail in the spring. Are they as easy as everyone says?
kusanar314
Well-known member
Welcome! What part of Virginia? I'm in the Roanoke / Bedford area and don't currently have rabbits, but I'm gearing up to get some in the next year or 2.
Welcome! I'm a new rabbit mama but have been raising quail for 2 years!
Coturnix have a learning curve like everything else but I find them to be very easy now that I've studied them excessively and had them for a couple years. I just downsized my birds and swapped my second quail run out to make it into a rabbit run. I have bought three batches of breeding quintets from Southwest Gamebirds (started with one breeding quintet) since I'm in California and they're in Arizona so it wasn't far to ship them. All were very very nice quality birds. I wanted all the colors! I've hatched and raised many incubators full of chicks from my own birds. I would not recommend them as a meat source although I got all jumbos. They are delicious but do not make much of a meal. They have been fabulous for eggs however! Quail and rabbits are two of the easiest small homesteader livestock to have. If you are a bird fan then they are a lot of fun, otherwise I would just get 6 or 8 hens for eggs. We converted 8x8 peak roofed welded wire heavy duty dog run into an aviary, wrapped the whole thing in half-inch hardware cloth, put a hardware cloth barrier underneath and set it all on a base of 50 lb planter bricks. Secured it with T stakes. Put on a plywood roof covered with shingles covered with corrugated plastic. Added a gutter over the door. Added half walls of plywood. Their flooring base is gravel with 3 in of decomposed granite and 3 in of sand over that. Works like a dream.
It might be an issue with the nest box design. If the box has a lip that is too low, healthy, active babies can easily "pop out," especially if they've moved their nest bowl toward the front of the box. Mother rabbits do not seem to have any instinct whatsoever to pick them up and put them back in. (I've never seen a rabbit that could/would pick up a kit to pull it out, either). The other thing that can happen is that, in a large litter, some of the kits don't get as much milk as they want, and they hang on when the mother is leaving the nest box; especially if the front is low, and they can end up outside the box that way.
There are two things we've done over the years to reduce pop-outs. One is to make the front of the box quite high (the mother will go in, even if the box has no entrance at all, with four high sides with an opening at the top). The other is to build the boxes with a bottom that slants toward the back. In this case gravity helps keep the kits in the back of the box where they are less likely to pop out.
We did have a Mini Rex doe that constantly re-made her nest for a week after kindling, and when she dug out the nest for her daily remodel, the kits went flying across the cage as she dug.
Fortunately, she was in my daughter's room, where they could be rescued.I have found coturnix to be very easy, even easier than chickens (I do love my chickens!). They take so much less room, they're quiet and usually very peaceful. Our females lay an egg a day till they die (!) starting at 6-8 weeks of age till at least 4 years of age, assuming of course they've got an adequate daily light schedule. Their eggs are smaller than chicken eggs, but can definitely be subbed for them when the chickens stop laying (moult, etc).
Our Jumbo Browns were definitely a good food source. When my youngest daughter raised them for the 4-H Junior Livestock Market Auction a few years ago, they weighed an average of 1.2 pounds at 8 weeks. The kids call them "personal sized meals."
That's not much shorter turn-around than rabbits, but you can hatch dozens and dozens of eggs at once.The only time we've had troubles with them is when they run out of food or water (they were my kids' projects!), they'll start to pick on each other. When the *** ratio is off, same thing. We could raise all males together, or one male to each 3-5 females, but if we had other ratios the males would hammer each other.
Raising them in wire battery cages with egg roll-outs was not ideal, as the quail tore their feet up scratching when they were eating. Since shifting to solid bottom cages and/or tractors (winter/summer), we've found that they live a lot longer and stay healthy and beautiful.
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