Building a flight pen

I need to build a flight pen to raise quail for my outdoor ministry's quail hunts. We're only looking to raise around 200 at a time. How large does the pen need to be to accommodate 200 quail?

Speaking from experience. DON'T DO IT. If you are only raising a few at a time, it is a lot of work and still costs a lot. You WILL NOT be saving any money and if things happen to go wrong, you are going to lose money. If you must do it, you will be fine with a 20X10' pen.

rapid fire said:

Speaking from experience. DON'T DO IT. If you are only raising a few at a time, it is a lot of work and still costs a lot. You WILL NOT be saving any money and if things happen to go wrong, you are going to lose money. If you must do it, you will be fine with a 20X10' pen.

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I was going to give the same advice. If you want to raise 200 grown birds from day old chicks you will also have to start with more than 200 initially. If this is something you want to do more than once a year you will have to wait until the birds are grown before you can start a new batch and if it is only for once a year it will be cheaper to buy 200 grown birds.

That's something I was afraid of, but I've got people willing to help out.

Problem with buying birds is this: we usually hold our quail hunts between the end of January and early March when nothing else is going on. Most bird farmers are totally sold out by then and it's been a real challenge to find enough birds for a shoot.

I'm up here as far north as you can go in this state. It's hard to find birds within 4 hours of here.

Birds

I'm delivering 200 bobwhites to owltown (blairsville) tomorrow and can del anytime you need give me a call
706-818-0320

HOWCO said:

I'm delivering 200 bobwhites to owltown (blairsville) tomorrow and can del anytime you need give me a call
706-818-0320

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You still gonna have 200 available in February? That's the problem we run into the most. Everybody has sold out by then.

I bet if you pay him now, he will have birds for you in Feb. Again, I strongly advise against raising your own. You could buy grown birds closer to time and store them, but you may lose some flight ability.

Quail

We should have birds that late but as always we would like to sell out early!!!
If you want to pay half down I will hold back some for you, thats how the larger groups buy and then we deliver as needed
we normally keep back around 1,000 for breeders and to make sure we have birds for our end of the season hunt.
Thanks

All of the above are correct with such a small number of birds. However, if you really want to build one for best results make is a high and as long as you can. My friend Ricky raises birds and he has some of the best flyers I have ever seen. They fly high, fast and far. His pen is 16 ft. high and 30 ft. wide and about 100 ft. long. He has a 2X6 ban around the inside about 12 ft high, the birds fly up and sit on this and it gets them use to flying high. Sometimes I go in the pen and the ban is completely covered with birds. Make sure you put a liner panel to keep the birds from flying into the wire and killing themselves.

Rapid Fire is right...if you are trying to raise birds to save a buck you are better off buying grown birds and putting them in your pen for three or four weeks before releasing. Commercial houses between feed and power bills have about $2 bucks in each bird (at 16 weeks) before they are sold. So there ain't a whole lot of money in it for them when you take the time and feed into concideration.

Flight pens are not expensive to build but do need to be long enough for birds to sustain a bit of flight to strengthen their wings.

Another option is to build or buy a Johnny House where you can release and recall birds on a regular basis to limit the number of birds you will need to buy over the course of the season.

If you would like info on building or buying a Johnny House or obtaining info on buying quail or hatching eggs please call 404-863-9190.

NGQuail said:

Rapid Fire is right...if you are trying to raise birds to save a buck you are better off buying grown birds and putting them in your pen for three or four weeks before releasing. Commercial houses between feed and power bills have about $2 bucks in each bird (at 16 weeks) before they are sold. So there ain't a whole lot of money in it for them when you take the time and feed into concideration.

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$2 a bird sounds great. I'm telling you, I called 10 or 12 different suppliers last year and the closest one that had ANY birds was in Calhoun, nearly 2 hours away, and wanted $4 per bird.

I've got a man at church that has an incubator and hatches his own quail for eating. If we could raise birds for $2 per bird, I'd be tickled pink.

lol...then get to building! *smiles*

It's a little late for this season though...baby quail need near constant attention...food, water, warmth...and if you neglect even one for any period of time you have lost your whole batch. But don't get me wrong, raising quail is a very rewarding hobby...I enjoy it very much.

But like all farming it takes a lot of planning ahead for the next season, if I were you I would go ahead and build the pen or house and either buy babies or hatch some out around May or June of next year when it is nice and warm outside for brooding.

That will also give you time to grow them to maturity and have a month or so to flight condition them before the shooting season starts.

But in any event good luck.