From egg to adult quail: the whole journey

Nine weeks. That's the whole arc — from putting an egg in an incubator to collecting an egg from the bird that came out of it.

It's the thing that makes quail so compelling to keep. With chickens you're waiting half a year for the first egg. With quail you can start in the spring half-term and have laying hens before the summer holidays.

This is the overview of the whole journey, with links to the detailed guides for each stage.

The timeline at a glance

Stage	When	What's happening
Incubation	Days 1–14	37.5 °C, 45–55% humidity, turning 3+ times daily
Lockdown	Day 14	Stop turning, humidity up to 65–70%, lid stays shut
Hatch	Day 17	Pipping, zipping, and a lot of waiting
Brooder week 1	Days 1–7	35 °C, the riskiest week by far
Brooder week 2	Days 8–14	Feathering, flying, temperature dropping
Weeks 3–4	Days 15–30	Sexing possible, moving out of the brooder
Point of lay	Week 6–8	First eggs

Stage 1: the eggs (before day 1)

Your hatch rate is largely decided before the incubator is even switched on.

Use eggs under a week old, stored pointy-end down at 15–18 °C, turned daily while stored. Don't wash them — the shell's natural bloom is what keeps bacteria out. Reject anything cracked, oddly shaped, or with a thin shell.

If you're buying posted eggs, expect a lower hatch rate no matter what you do. They've been shaken about and the air cells often detach. Stand them pointy-end down for 12–24 hours before setting.

Stage 2: incubation, days 1–14

Steady temperature, moderate humidity, regular turning. The detail matters more than the summary, so the full setup — including why the incubator's own thermometer shouldn't be trusted — is in Setting up an incubator for quail eggs.

The headline numbers: 37.5 °C in a fan-assisted incubator, 45–55% humidity, turned an odd number of times a day, at least three.

Candle at day 7. Quail eggs are speckled and awkward to candle, so be forgiving of yourself — if you can't tell, leave the egg in.

Stage 3: lockdown and hatch, days 14–17

At day 14 you stop turning, raise the humidity to 65–70%, and close the lid for the last time.

Hatching starts around day 17 and takes far longer than anyone expects — many hours from the first crack to a chick out of the shell. It looks distressing and the overwhelming temptation is to help. Mostly you shouldn't, and our hatch day guide explains when the exception applies.

Leave hatched chicks in the incubator until dry and fluffy, up to 24 hours. They've absorbed the yolk and don't need feeding yet.

Stage 4: the brooder, week one

This is the dangerous week. If you're going to lose chicks, it'll be now.

The brooder needs to be at 35 °C directly under the heat source before the chicks arrive, with cooler areas they can move to. A heat plate is safer than a lamp — no fire risk, no light keeping them awake, and it mimics a mother bird.

Three things kill first-week quail chicks, all preventable:

• Drowning. Marbles or pebbles in the drinker. Always.
• Chilling. Watch behaviour, not the thermometer — huddled in a pile means cold, spread out panting at the edges means too hot.
• Spraddle leg. Slippery floors. Use non-slip matting or kitchen roll, never newspaper.

Feed is game bird starter crumb at 24–30% protein, ground finer for the first few days. Chicken chick crumb doesn't have enough protein.

Full detail in Quail chicks, days 1 to 7.

Stage 5: weeks two and three

They go from fluffy to scruffy in about four days, and it's genuinely comical. Pin feathers come through unevenly and they look half-plucked for a fortnight. It's normal.

Drop the brooder temperature by around 3 °C each week. And put a lid on — they start flying at about two weeks and they are far better at it than you'd like.

See days 8 to 14 for the detail.

Stage 6: weeks three and four — sexing and moving out

At around three weeks, pharaoh-coloured birds can be sexed by their breast feathers: speckled means female, plain rusty-brown means male. White and tuxedo varieties won't tell you this way.

This is where you find out what you've actually hatched, and it's where the plan you should have made earlier becomes urgent. You'll get roughly 50/50. A group with too many males will fight, injure each other, and over-mate the hens.

Target one male to four or five females, or none at all.

By four weeks they're fully feathered and can move to their permanent housing, provided it's dry and sheltered. Details in days 14 to 30.

Stage 7: point of lay, week six onwards

Somewhere between six and eight weeks, you'll find the first egg. It'll probably be small, oddly shaped, and lying in the middle of the floor, because quail have no interest in nest boxes.

Switch from starter crumb to a layer or maintenance feed around this point, and add oyster shell or crushed eggshell for calcium. Grit and calcium are different things and they need both.

Laying needs 14–16 hours of daylight, so birds hatched late in the year may not lay properly until spring.

The bit worth planning before you start

Two things people work out too late:

You will hatch males. Roughly half. Decide now what happens to them — whether that's rehoming, keeping a bachelor group separately (it works, but only if there are no hens in sight or earshot), or dispatching them for the table. It's a legitimate part of keeping quail and the birds are bred for it, but it's much easier to decide in advance than while looking at a box of three-week-olds.

A quail's laying life is short. Excellent in year one, noticeably down in year two, and they typically live two to three years. Keeping quail for eggs long-term means hatching a fresh batch every year. That's not a flaw — it's just the shape of the hobby, and it's why the incubator never really goes away.

If that sounds like more of a commitment than you fancy, chickens might suit you better. But nine weeks from egg to egg is a genuinely lovely thing to watch happen, and it never really stops being impressive.