I'm going to up front admit that I know next to nothing about quail and give you some backstory about this problem. A friend of mine gave me some button quail eggs after her male died, and told me she wasn't sure if they were fertile and wasn't sure her incubator was working right so could I hatch them please? She told me "They have a 14 day hatch cycle, so it'll be really fast!" Trusting her... I didn't even look up the incubation time and killed one of the good eggs on day 16 when I cracked one to find out why they didn't hatch *facepalm* But in any case, I did have two hatch, a little chinese painted and... a something else yellow. Quark and Hadron. They're a little less than 3 weeks old now.
Now, Quark is doing great. Getting in all his feathers, talking CONSTANTLY to Hadron. He's very interested in everything I am doing (if I am putting fresh water in he's examining it to make sure it's not poison, if I poke at the food he's there making sure I'm not taking the best crumbles etc). At this moment, he's incredibly excited about the water dish I just put in because it's big enough to get into, so he's jumping in and out taking a water bath and then a shavings bath and back again (looking an awful lot like my peacocks when they take dirt/sand baths).
Hadron, on the other hand, despite hatching less than a day later than Quark, still looks like a just-hatched chick. He's got a few wing pinfeathers, but the rest is chick down. He doesn't make any noise. He follows Quark around, drinks when Quark drinks, eats when Quark eats (and sometimes more often). He runs around as much as a normal chicken chick does, but not as much as Quark does.
The thing that's got me concerned is that after he drinks, he starts making the choking gasping dying face and goes to lay under the heat lamp. It's like when he drinks, he suddenly can't breathe or something. I picked him up today and felt around his crop, but he had nothing in it so it wasn't clogged up. He made some garbled cheep noises when I was poking at his throat, but they weren't cheeps like Quark makes, it was like... smoker's cheep! No one in the house smokes and they aren't on bedding that has dust (they're on paper towel with a little bit of carefresh hypo-allergenic bedding to push around and nest in).
Anyone have any idea what is going on with this kid? Is there a sort of button quail that just goes slower? Is the gasping a common problem for them? Is there anything I can do?
Now, Quark is doing great. Getting in all his feathers, talking CONSTANTLY to Hadron. He's very interested in everything I am doing (if I am putting fresh water in he's examining it to make sure it's not poison, if I poke at the food he's there making sure I'm not taking the best crumbles etc). At this moment, he's incredibly excited about the water dish I just put in because it's big enough to get into, so he's jumping in and out taking a water bath and then a shavings bath and back again (looking an awful lot like my peacocks when they take dirt/sand baths).
Hadron, on the other hand, despite hatching less than a day later than Quark, still looks like a just-hatched chick. He's got a few wing pinfeathers, but the rest is chick down. He doesn't make any noise. He follows Quark around, drinks when Quark drinks, eats when Quark eats (and sometimes more often). He runs around as much as a normal chicken chick does, but not as much as Quark does.
The thing that's got me concerned is that after he drinks, he starts making the choking gasping dying face and goes to lay under the heat lamp. It's like when he drinks, he suddenly can't breathe or something. I picked him up today and felt around his crop, but he had nothing in it so it wasn't clogged up. He made some garbled cheep noises when I was poking at his throat, but they weren't cheeps like Quark makes, it was like... smoker's cheep! No one in the house smokes and they aren't on bedding that has dust (they're on paper towel with a little bit of carefresh hypo-allergenic bedding to push around and nest in).
Anyone have any idea what is going on with this kid? Is there a sort of button quail that just goes slower? Is the gasping a common problem for them? Is there anything I can do?
