Zara Sutcliffe, a teen who lives outside of Manchester, England, had read about a person who had hatched a duck from eggs bought from the grocery store and asked her mother if she could conduct a similar experiment. Although her father had said that the family could have no new animals, Zara’s mum relented and allowed her to choose between chicken or quail eggs, as there were no duck eggs available.
I originally wanted a duck egg. My mum would let me because she thought it wouldn’t work. So we went into Sainsburys but there wasn’t any duck eggs. We settled on quail eggs we brought them home and some had smashed. I didn’t really mind cuz we still had at least 10 eggs left.
She chose quail eggs because she liked the color. After three weeks of attending to the eggs in her room, a little male quail hatched. Zara named the baby bird Pebbles. Another quail had hatched but failed to thrive. After a while, Zara noticed that Pebbles was lonely and needed company. The family added two more and then four more female quails for a total of seven. This way, Pebbles has a good chance of having chicks of his own.
We have Pebbles, who was squeaking a lot and we didn’t know what to do, so we got him two more friends. But we then decided that one could possibly be a boy and we needed to get the numbers right so we got four more girls for Pebbles. So now we have seven quails.
