Quail Mgmt

[osprey]

Hey Deer Hunter, you were asking about quail in another thread, check out this site - www.quailrestoration.com - it's got some neat stuff on supplemental feeding, ragweed mgmt, and a thing called the Surrogator for raise/release birds. Some cool info...

I may look into some of it.

[Rommel]

You might want to check the DNR Regs. on Raising game birds. You might also be able to locate, from there list of people who hold a game husbandry license, a local person who raises quail to make your purchases and get advise. When I was raising birds they told me that I was not allowed to release pen raised birds into the wild. I could only place birds that were properly banded into the field for retriever training purposes. Good luck, this can be fun and you'll always have birds for the table.

www.dnr.state.md.us/wildlife/gamehus.asp

If you want some advise on building a flying pen let me know. I've built a couple and have some experience with the problems you might come across when doing a project like this.

[Hardcorehunter]

I've never eaten quail. Do they taste like chicken? Or a bit gamier?

[busco]

ive only ate farm raised quail never wild.. was good. but am sure that their would be a noticeable difference

[osprey]

Much better than chicken!

[captwahoo]

when we were raising phesant in maryland, DNR had very strict rules on releasing pen raised birds. I know in virginia, you can release pen raised quail, only on private property. they still must be banded and logged. I plan on raising birds on my mountain property and just releasing them, If they make it, great, if they don't I will just keep raising them. You can get eggs on the internet. The size of your flypen will determine how good they fly. If you have short pen, they won't fly very far. we made our flypens 100 free by 8 foot by 10 foot high. We had some really good flyers. For phesants peeper are key, you attach them at 12 weeks and they will leave each other alone. Not much work, and alot of fun to hunt.