Thursday 3 May 2012

Quail, exams, freedom, more quail - in that order.

It's been a long 2 weeks but I have finally completed all the exams I need to take to become an Animal Health Technologist (save my national exam, the VTNE - but that's a few weeks down the road right now). I haven't had much time to work with Brita on any new stunts, but she has been getting her share of mischief time. Quail are an excellent antidote to good time management. Instead of studying, I can bring Brita out to play on my desk. When she acts silly I can video it and put it on Youtube. There's an easy death of 3 hours that I would have otherwise used staring blankly at my textbooks pretending to study.




Brita is going to spend the next four weeks at my teacher's place while I am on practicum again, where she will have free run of a large room in the chicken coop with another quail hen for company. The remaining others are going to a new home this week, and when I get back, Brita's new companion may or may not come home with me too. I haven't decided whether I want to keep Brita as a singleton or have a companion for her again. It was a shame what happened to Blondie, her old companion, but I admit it has been much easier to train Brita without another quail as a distraction. We shall see. She seems to get along just fine on her own.

Now that I am finished schooling for a while, I'd like to start expanding the information section on this site to include more articles on the husbandry and breeding of coturnix as a hobby. I have been spending some time on Internet forums in an attempt to get a feel for what kinds of questions people are asking and what kinds of challenges new quail keepers find themselves up against. I never intended this blog to be about anything more than Brita's clickertraining, but I'm for than just a fan of training quail - I'm a quail fanatic all-around. Hopefully I can conglomerate some useful knowledge on this site to help people get started on their journey with quail. Because quail are awesome. I just don't know how else to explain it.

When I am finally working and living at an actual house instead of on campus, I can expand my quail operation to include more than one contraband quail living under the desk in my dorm (and I have adopted a cat from our school program who is going to live in the dorm with myself, Brita, and Puffy Figgis the green-spotted pufferfish for a whole ten days - which should prove interesting).

"Thor" (he came with that name)
And I got to personally tattoo, microchip, and neuter him! >:)


I am planning on moving to Prince George, BC where I have family and friends and start working at a veterinary clinic as an AHT, find a place where I can start my quail hobby up again from scratch and eventually buy a wee bit of land where I can go hog wild with any hobby I want, and no landlord or city by-law to stop me! (ie hide from).