It all started with a YouTube video and a child who wanted to be Gerald Durrell. One moment we were saying “maybe” to hatching pet quail eggs, and the next we were sneaking an incubator into the loft.

Kenny Coogan: What is [a quail’s] egg production look like? Eric Stromberg: A coturnix quail lays around 300 eggs per year give or take, that’s gonna be dependent on a lot of different variables, just ...

Observant biologists have long known that among such game birds as quail, partridge, pheasant and grouse, all the eggs in a nest tend to hatch at about the same time—even though they were laid several ...