Warning: contains details of killing a quail, so do not read on if you don’t want to read about it.
So, we’ve had a couple of gorgeous days of weather, it’s lovely, but cold today, yesterday was even a bit warm! So we went outside instead of doing anything else. It was lovely, we’ve been mowing and weeding and running about and the boys have just been playing.
Ireland brought new measures into place yesterday, which means Chris is now off work for at least 2 weeks. The new measures mean the car testing (NCT) place has also shut down, but no one actually informed the customers (including Chris who had an appointment for the car’s retest this morning), so he came home again. I’m presuming they’re going to extend the test periods so people can actually still drive legally.
The quail raising thing hasn’t worked at all… we only have one left and he’s a male and was plucking all feathers from the other one we had left. I’ve had to kill the other one as it had splayed legs and couldn’t move properly. It’s the first time I’ve had to do this to a quail.. the rest died naturally quite a while ago. It was ok as far as killing any animal goes.. You use very sharp scissors and basically cut their head off from behind, over a bucket. I went down to the barn to do it, away from the kids. I was hovering for a bit, should I? shouldn’t I? then I decided to do it, my heart was hammering. Thankfully, the scissors were extremely sharp and it was done without any problems. This is part of what we intended our life to be (but it was supposed to be animals for food, mind, not because there was something wrong with them), so probably good to get experience, but it was still hard to do. I’ve learnt a lot from raising them though, so if we ever decide to do it again, we’ve got a lot better idea about what’s involved… we’ll see though, I think I’d rather have chickens, having tried both. I’ll probably have to do the other quail too this weekend, seeing how he’s on his own and is a feather plucker. So, steep learning curve there from the whole experience… unfortunately! in a lot of ways, but it’s been useful in others. Sorry if it makes you cringe, it is what it is I’m afraid!
I’ve just sent a message to someone to see if we can get some chicken eggs to hatch (sent in the post), so we’ll start again and try to do a little better this time! I’m going for a dual purpose chicken, so we can have them for either eggs or meat in the future. Hopefully, it’ll go well and there’ll be a good hatch rate and healthy birds.
The Shepherds Adventure 