Tips for keeping quail comfortable in excessive heat waves

maycwindu

Songster
7 Years
Jul 26, 2014
46
55
109
Hi All,
Where I live, it commonly gets above 100 degrees by midsummer. The quail are able to tolerate it alright, but they're constantly gular fluttering (just a ornithological term for bird panting) and quite uncomfortable.

In the evening, I soak some patches of their aviary soil so it's a nice cool retreat for them to dig under. I'm also trying to encourage them to step into a pan of water by tossing rice krispies into the water. The quail will wade in after the treats. I don't think they really correlate the cooling effect with the water, though, so they don't use the water pan unless I have a treat floating in there. Maybe after a lot of repetition, but something tells me quail kinda don't get water. As an aside, if any of you have any anecdotes of quail water bathing I'd love to hear them.

When I'm away in the afternoon, they have to stay in the coop, away from the water pan and cool aviary soil. Is there something I can do to help them keep cool in the coop? They do enjoy a slice of cold watermelon, but that only goes so far.
 

le_bwah

Crowing
May 1, 2018
1,135
2,855
306
Boise, ID
My Coop
My Coop
I freeze cake pans of water and put the resulting ice blocks near where the birds like to splay out. They never touch it (except to peck at it sometimes) but the meltwater keeps their wallowing spots cool during peak heat. Nabiki's got a great idea with the bottles. I wonder if you couldn't design them to "leak" slowly onto a rag, get some evaporative cooling going.

They work great for keeping the birds cool, but I swear a "wading pool" passed staph around my flock as we had cases of bumblefoot come and go with the soilable water (no matter how often I changed it). They never truly bathed in it, but would stand and flutter their eyes like they were falling asleep, sometimes drink from it. Also, as I should have expected, they pooped in it.

It's 100 degrees Fahrenheit here today and we're just getting starting. I do a box fan + water mister setup that makes things noticeably cooler. If you can hook up any fan to their coop (PC cooling fan maybe?), that could take the lethality out of a heat wave.

Best of luck!
 

eveliens

Songster
Jun 24, 2020
168
253
141
My coturnix love to sit in "pools" as do my button quail. The coturnix also love to get sprayed down with the hose (when I am hosing down the bird area - they run over to get under the spray), the weirdos. They don't really bathe in water though, since they're ground birds and use dirt instead.

There are good suggestions already. You might look into making a "zeer pot" (2 ceramic pots, some sand and water) to cool the area as well. Mine won't do anything with iced water bottles but put I do put "freezer pops"/freezer sticks (plastic sticks with coolant in them) in their water to keep it cool all day. You could also try a litter tray with sand or dirt in it for them to roll in. That's how I'm keeping my growout button quail cool since they're not in the aviary.
 

Dandichook

Songster
Aug 29, 2021
68
175
133
North Florida
Seconding Nabiki's water bottle idea! I use smaller individual serving bottles though and if I put them into their dust bath areas the quail will cuddle up to them. Some of them seem to like standing with their chests resting on top of the bottles, which they can't do with the larger ones, so I think it might be a good idea to do both sizes if you have the space.

We have been testing a little fan attached to a portable solar panel on one of our coops as well. It's not the strongest fan, but the air movement at least keeps it a little less stale feeling inside their coop.
 

GypsyGen

Chirping
7 Years
Mar 24, 2015
19
2
89
Pacifica
My mom lives in Sacramento. We used to bury the ice packs in the eco flakes and she had a mister set up for the really hot 100+days she’d also sometimes freeze melon and put that in there for them to peck at while it de thawed.
 

Blue Penguin

Chirping
Apr 12, 2022
81
331
91
Fishing
It got pretty hot where I'm at recently and I dumped some ice flakes on the ground and one looked like she knew ice was much and cool so she stood on it for a bit.

20220624_170103.JPG



I currently have two tarps covering half the enclosure for the side with peak sun hours and that seemed to help.
 

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