Despite a problem with an exploding egg in my incubator, most of the quail eggs I have hatched (and some are in the process of hatching).  The button quail eggs were so tiny, that I accidentally broke two during the incubation period while turning the eggs.

I prefer hand turning to machine turning.  It seems more involved; plus, toward the end of incubation, when the chicks are pipping, I talk to them and they then know my voice and aren't quite so jumpy when I am around.  (Yes, I know that makes me sound mental, but hey, it works.)

Scanned image of button quail egg and Coturnix quail egg (blurry, I know)

The tiny button quail are so much more active than the Texas A & M White Coturnix, it is like watching tiny Japanese Black Tail Whites and Dark Cornish chicks; it seems the tinier the bird, the jumpier it is.

The button quail also seem to recoup faster from hatching.   They were up and running almost instantly, whereas the coturnix lay under the brooder lamp for several hours before getting up and eating.

Relative sizes of button quail chicks and coturnix; the button quail are on the left.  The coturnix quail, the two on the left, came from smaller eggs, but are still huge in comparison to the buttons.

The first batch of quail I hatched is just about old enough to start laying; I am happy to be raising birds where I don't have to wait 6 months for an egg....

From the Smoking Gun comes a story about a sicko who was screwing a roadkilled deer when he was arrested.  The lawyer for this freak says that since the weirdo was f'ing a dead animal, the law does not apply.  However, this whompnut was previously convicted of killing a horse to screw it. 

Mr. Bryan James Hathaway really, really needs to get behind a really pissed off horse and get his nuts kicked off.  Maybe that will cure his predilection for f'ing dead animals.

I have always loved live Christmas trees.  Not cut trees, not artifical.  Live, potted trees.  Sometimes the little trees would live, but usually we were so broke, we bought them when they were already pretty sickly.  Even if I was lucky enough to get them to live, invariably Ronald would let the horses "mow" the lawn...and they would mow down the Christmas trees too. 

But there was one very little tree that the girls gave me to put in my office when I worked for TDHS 1996.  It was a very tiny little tree, one of those ones that are in the check out aisles at Walmart.  The poor little tree was almost dead, but it came back pretty well sitting in my office window.  After Christmas, Ron planted it on the north side of the place in Alvin, hoping the horses would leave it alone there.

At that time, the willows and tallows were short.  But they quickly outgrew the little tree.  Then Darla ate it down to a nub in the ground about three years ago.  I thought it was a total goner.

But before Alyssa left for the Army, she pointed it out to me when we were trying to get Junior out of a willow on that side of the house.  It had managed to regrow from the stump to about 3 feet tall, though because it had gotten so little sun under the other trees, it looks like Charlie Brown's--thin and scraggly.

Before moving up here, I showed it Ron and asked that he move that along with the cannas and the crepe mertle.  We moved the cannas and crepe mertle last week, but didn't get a chance to move the little tree because the sun went down and we couldn't find in the dark.  Even in the daylight though, in the undergrowth, it was pretty hard to distingquish from the overgrowth.

Today, a little tree that has struggled for ten years to grow up will finally gets it's chance.  It will have full sun until late afternoon, good drainage, and won't have to compete with faster growing trees.  Maybe, after all this time, I will even be able to figure out what the heck kind of little blue tree it is, once it puts on enough foliage.