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In an attempt to stop the birds flying away, you can easily clip their wings. This involves trimming the primary feathers on one wing, in order to make take-off an unbalanced affair.
This is normally a job that needs 2 people. One person should hold the bird, and stretch out one of the wings. The second person should then cut off the back feathers on the quail's wing using a pair of scissors. Trim the longest feathers back to 1cm from the next row of feathers. This will not hurt the quail, and they will not feel anything, it is very similar to us cutting our nails. The effect of wing clipping is to unbalance the birds. This means that the bird will not be able to gain as much height during flight as it usually would.
Comments
Alison, 10 July 2016
Thank you for all the info - I have been given some Quail for my allotment and love them they are so cute and I think I may soon spend more time watching them than gardening. I will now build them a nice warm home for the winter (their summer home may not be warm enough ) and clip their wings as didn't know they were good at flying. Thanks again x
Miniziter@Gmail, 12 July 2013
Nice one! I'll quickly do this for my Quails.