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OUR STORY
Where Welfare Matters Above All Else
So, if you've been reading on the home page you'll already know why we started... To give the twins a bit of excitement during the lockdown, this excitement has, in turn, grown into a little adventure of small-scale Urban eggs and lovely well looked after birds, reared in a garden environment with love and care, and where the bird's welfare is paramount.
We began with just a small £25 Facebook incubator and 12 eggs from eBay, these hatched into 5 beautiful chicks, and as luck would have it 1 boy that we named Plute (after remembering all the stories my Nan would tell about her and my Grandad and there chickens, and a very friendly cockerel called... you guessed it Plute) and 4 females, Goldie, Blueie, Rockstar and Dorris.
Myself, having an interest in these little birds from a young age has led to a lifetime of passion for quail, keeping them on and off for over 20 years with breeds ranging from the mini Chinese Painted Quail through to stocky Mountains. For me personally (and my fiancé) its so exciting to see the twins and indeed the next generations interest in these marvellous tiny creatures.
DEFRA
REGISTERED
& APPROVED
ABOUT URBAN BIRDS
We are a small scale, family run and built Quail breeder but with big ideas, all set in a town garden in an urban setting. We sell loads of lovely fresh hatching eggs, from birds that are kept in large sold floor covered pens that are open fronted (except in extreme weather) that keep them warm and dry, and well ventilated. This promotes happy, health and hardy birds!
They always have access to fresh clean water and lots of our own blend of food with lots and lots of fresh treats.
We knew right from the get go we wanted to keep all of our birds on clean bedding and NOT wire, fed a varied and mixed mixed diet, incorporating copious amounts of garden grown veg and salad, and the odd mealworm thrown in to help keep things interesting.
For us this is the only way to keep them, far to often we see these poor birds kept on wire with nothing to keep them occupied or interested and no where to scratch and dust bath and are purely there for someone's financial gain, while we do sell our eggs and some young birds they are all treated with respect and compassion. People are often misled in our opinion, that wire floor cages are are better system for keeping quail, the question we should ask though is, is it better for the quail...Or the quail keeper?
Right from the get go we let the twins help make the decisions about the birds and there care, hours were spent trawling the internet with them for information on quail and how to keep them, not that we necessarily needed it, as I said earlier I've been keeping them for years before this, but it so so interesting to see how the kids responded to seeing the images of poorly kept birds and birds on wire and as the kids said "Look how sad they look, we never want to see our birds like this" this is something I'm so pleased has stuck with us as UBRAN BIRDS has grown!
As we like to say Happy, Healthy and Hardy birds.
WHAT WE SELL
HATCHING EGGS AND HAPPY, HEALTHY, HARDY BIRDS!
As you might of gathered by now the kids have a lot to do with not only how we keep our birds and care for them but also our sales, both the hatching eggs and our POL birds.
The kids, together with us help to collect and box eggs for postage, and we post eggs daily, Monday - Thursdays so we can try and avoid parcels being held up in the post over the weekend.
For the birds we hatch for sale, we don't sell until we are happy they are off heat and sexable, this generally means they are 6-7 weeks old and about to start laying if they aren't already. As a side note we don't sell chicks or just male groups unless they are for replacement breeders. We also don't sell pairs of birds unless you already have extra females as the little men can be a little "rambunctious" should we say with there partners. Quartets and quintets are readily available.
We now also stock pairs of Chinese painted quail, Mountain Quail, Harlequin Quail and Californian quail as well as their hatching eggs.