A brooding quail

In our quail aviary, we have two hutches and the birds are free to come and go into them as they please. They tend to use them for egg laying. This morning I opened one of them to find a quail hen brooding a set of eggs. Quail can be difficult to hatch naturally and so far all the ones we have produced have been from eggs we have put in our incubator. However, I decided to leave the bird alone and let her incubate the eggs herself.

Hopefully this will be a success as when I got home we had something of a setback. Our incubator had broken down. The 18 eggs I added to the incubator last Friday were all cold. I couldn't get the incubator working again. These eggs are now lost to us. We will have to get a new machine or borrow one.