17/06/2026
These gnarled and scaly little feet belonged to someone I loved dearly, but had to say a gentle and peaceful farewell to today after a short but terminal illness, to make sure we upheld our promise to give as many good days as possible to all who come through our gates. She had lived more than 3 lifespans that most captive quail will ever see, ancient and wise and at the same time still curious and engaged.
Looking at these feet after she passed, I found myself tracing the story of her life.
The missing toes. The twisted joints. The thickened scales. Every deformity is evidence of a life that adapted to conditions no animal should have had to endure. Frostbite doesn’t happen in a warm, protected environment. Arthritic feet don’t develop from walking through grass, dust baths, and soft bedding. They develop from years of standing on wire and metal grates, on surfaces that were never meant to support a living body.
Before she came to us, Mama was one of a group of quail discovered packed into a tiny cage in someone’s garage. The person hired to care for the property stumbled upon them and asked if they should be feeding the birds.
“No,” they were told. “They’re not laying anymore. They’ll just die.” Not a second thought was given to them.
Had that caretaker not reached out for help, that would have been the end of Mama’s story.
Instead, she came here.
And what strikes me most isn’t what happened before she arrived. It’s what happened after. Because for all the ways industrial breeding had shaped her body, it never erased who she was.
People are told quail are simple. Disposable. Nervous little production animals. Egg machines. But Mama disproved that every day.
This was a bird who felt safe enough to hide eggs from us and hatch babies, an extraordinarily rare thing for a quail to “go broody”. Safe enough to believe they would survive. Maybe she took on that secret little family, an enormous investment, with a sense of safety, and the certainty that tomorrow would exist. Somewhere along the way, a little quail who had spent years in a garage waiting to die decided that the world had become good enough to bring babies into it.
And then she showed us exactly who she was. Not an egg layer. Not livestock. Not inventory. A mother.
A vigilant one. Counting babies. Calling them in. Tucking them beneath her feathers. Making sure every single one was warm and safe beneath her chunky little body. Continuing to love them long after they were grown.
I think that’s one of the most heartbreaking things about quail. Their suffering is so normalized that people rarely stop to ask who they might have been under different circumstances. They’re kept in tiny cages because we’ve decided they’re the sort of animal who tolerates tiny cages. They’re left in freezing temperatures because we’ve decided they’re hardy. Their reproductive systems are pushed beyond what their bodies were ever meant to do because we’ve decided their eggs matter more than they do.
And then a bird like Mama comes along and reminds us that beneath all of that manipulation is still an individual. Someone with preferences and relationships and fears and attachments. Someone who recognized the people she trusted. Someone who loved her babies. Someone whose body carried the scars of what humans had done to her, but whose spirit remained intact enough to build a family anyway.
Those little feet tell the story of everything she survived. But the babies she raised tell the story of who she was. Generous, kind, and invested in her own life and happiness. And in the end, I think that’s the more important story.
Rest easy, Mama. Your life was never supposed to matter to anyone.
We’re so grateful that it did.
