Three white jumbo coturnix quail surrounded by green plants.

Why did I decide to get quail?

Three white jumbo coturnix quail surrounded by green plants.

In my experience, your average person with no farm experience doesn’t dream of owning farm animals. But I’ve been obsessed with animals for as long as I can remember. I’ve found journals where I pretended my stuffed animals were real and I was their vet giving them a check up; I was the kid who befriended stray cats and brought them inside; I would sit at the creek and watch frogs and dragonflies for hours. I have always loved having animals around me, and I was especially fascinated by farm animals. 

Wooly sheep, mooing cows, snorting pigs, and clucking chickens – I wanted to be around them all. As soon as I could identify animals with words, I would yell out their names as my parents drove past farms. To be honest, I still do that today, and if I’m feeling extra emotional, I may just cry tears of joy at the sight of a lamb. 

So for a long time, I’ve had my heart set on at least having a hobby farm of chickens. I figured that even if I don’t have enough land (or finances) for anything else, I could have chickens on my tiny farm. But year after year went by and I still didn’t live in a setting that would allow chickens. 

So I guess you could say quail were my early mid-life crisis. I turned 33 years old in March of 2023 and STILL didn’t have one farm animal – or one house pet for that matter, since my husband is deathly allergic to “anything cute and fluffy” – his words, not mine – and I lost it. Actually crying on the couch lost it, because I just wanted something. 

In that moment, I think something clicked for me. I don’t live in the perfect house for a homestead, I don’t have a big backyard for a farm, I barely have garden beds for vegetable gardens, but I don’t have to wait for things to be perfect before I start.

I am so grateful for my husband, who supported me through all of this. He agreed to my ideas for garden beds, built those garden beds, and really became my “yes man” to get my dreams started. I decided to go all in on the gardening part of having a farm because we live in a residential area that does not allow backyard poultry, let alone livestock. 

And then, as I’m taking steps to follow my dream, quail literally fell into my lap. I was not researching chicken alternatives, I was not speaking out loud my desire to have chickens, I was just taking steps to live out the garden part of my dream and suddenly an Instagram reel about quail popped up in my feed while I was mindlessly scrolling. 

As soon as I watched 30 seconds of quail, I was hooked. I took a deep dive, found out they are allowed in most places where chickens are not, and texted my husband telling him I want quail. His response? 

Image of text message with the question, "Can we get quail?" Followed by an image of a brown quail with the website "Everything you need to know to get started raising quail." And then another text bubble saying, "They are quiet and little and don't need to free range like chickens?"
Image of text message conversation with a picture of a DIY chicken coop and the message "Would be easy to build a coop we can move around the yard:" Another message bubble saying, "The coop would be much smaller than that - that's for chickens :)" Followed by a response text bubble, "Yeah I'm game for quail! Where would we get them though are there breeders for quail lol"

A month later, we had a coop full of quail in our tiny backyard! 

So, other than fulfilling my childhood dreams, why did I decide to get quail?

  1. They are quiet – even the rooster’s crow is quieter than most of the songbirds in my neighborhood. And they only crow a couple times a day, maybe. I work from home and don’t even hear my rooster on most days! Because they are so quiet, I don’t think our neighboors even know we have quail.
  2. They are small – everything about quail is small: the birds, the eggs, and the coop. Quail don’t want to free range, they like feeling safe and enclosed. So their coop doesn’t need to be huge and can fit in pretty much any backyard. I’ve even seen pictures of quail coops on apartment balconies! 
  3. Eggs – quail lay about 300 eggs a year. The eggs are small, so you need more of them than you do with chicken eggs, but for just two of us, they produce enough for our needs. 
  4. Compost – quail poop is great compost! Technically, it is considered “cold” so you can put it directly in the garden and it won’t hurt the plants (chicken poop is “hot” and needs to compost for three months before applying to the garden). I still add my used quail bedding to the compost, though, since most of my gardens are full of food and I want to give any potential bacteria a chance to die off before adding it to my beds. 
  5. Dreams – I call them my “hobbit chickens” and they are fulfilling my backyard poultry dreams, which is making me so happy.

I am so happy we got quail and highly recommend keeping these little birds on your own homestead!