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Welcome to HighTail Farms, LLC! We're a small farm located in Greensboro, North Carolina. We are dedicated to providing people with ethically raised and humanely processed pastured poultry and sheep, fresh eggs, and raw meat for pet food. We are currently not producing any products for sale.

Please follow the links in the top bar for more information on our products and their availability. Continue reading below for our blog where we detail the adventures of raisin' animals and whatnot.

Friday, June 22, 2012

The case of the disappearing quail


We started out with 16 quail. When they got to be adults, we culled 4 of them (3 males and 1 puny female). That left us with 12 quail all happily living in a spacious indoor/outdoor pen. They seemed very content, even giving us 5-7 pretty little eggs a day. (Quail eggs are great for pickling by the way!)

 Then one day a couple weeks ago the Big Onion decided to do a head count. He came up with 9. We were missing 3 birds. These guys don't get let out every day like the rest of our birds, the door stays shut, and we thought the pen was pretty well secured with a double layer of chicken wired covering the outdoor area. 

I finally discovered one tiny little spot in the front corner of the pen that might be big enough for a quail and blocked it up. 

Then a couple of days ago, I was happily watering the watermelon patch in the garden (one of the few things I managed not to kill) and out pops a little quail! I grabbed a nearby flower pot and tried to catch her, but the little bugger took flight....straight into the back yard where 3 shelties and a Barley were just waiting for an afternoon snack to fly into their laps. 

I started yelling, "LEAVE IT! LEAVE IT! ISWEARTOGODIFYOUTOUCHITIWILLKILLYOU!!!" and all 4 dogs hit the breaks and put on their best "Who us? We would never!" looks. 

I guess this little quail gal picked up some survival skills in her couple weeks 'in the wild' because despite my best efforts, I was never able to catch her. Last I saw, she flew into the neighbor's huge hay field and disappeared into the tall grass. 

So, right now we have 50-something quail eggs in the incubator since our last batch was a complete dud. I blame the automatic turner. That damn thing always gives us terrible hatch rates. 

Hopefully, we can fill out our missing ranks with a good number of females. Keeping our fingers crossed for a successful hatch in a couple of weeks! 

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