Raising quail wasn’t all work. Every summer we entered our birds in the
County Fair and every year we won Best in Show. Not because our quail were the best but
because they were the only quail entered.
We had created educational displays about what quail ate and
how they lived in the wild for the kids. One day the principle of a local
private school stopped at our fair booth and asked if I could to do a
presentation to the science class. She
also asked if they could hatch quail eggs in the classroom like they could
chicken eggs. The classroom incubator
was the same type I used to start my quail business so I told her I thought it
would work.
The presentation went well and I don’t know who was more
excited about the hatch, me or the kids. Every day I stopped by after school hours to
check the temperature and humidity. The
eggs were scheduled to hatch on a Monday so I stopped in the Friday before to
get everything ready for the big event.
Early Monday morning the principle called to say something was terribly wrong
and could I come right away. When I got
there a familiar smell greeted me – dead chicks. I ran over to the incubator and saw some of
the eggs half open and some that were fully hatched but dead.
We quickly cleaned out the dead and dying chicks and tried
to get rid of the smell before any kids arrived. I was horrified and could not figure out what
had gone wrong. Everything looked
perfect on Friday. Even though a few chicks hatched and survived that day, they
asked me to remove the incubator immediately after school. Since I didn’t seem to know what had happened
they were not willing to risk finding any more dead chicks the next morning.
I didn’t think I could ever show my face at the school again
until the principle called and apologized.
The weekend before the hatch the janitor mistakenly unplugged the
incubator to plug in the floor polisher.
The sudden drop in temperature and humidity caused the initial
carnage. Once the temperature was back
to normal the rest of the chicks were able to hatch.
