About Me

Gary Ortlieb

I am a 62 years old and have been married for 39 years. My wife and I have 2 adult children. I worked in the printing industry for 36 years for the same company until they went out of business. That is how I learned to assemble pages on a computer.

I became interested in raising quail in 1994 and had to stop in 2008 due to personal reasons. I'm what many people would call a perfectionist, due to this fact, I make every problem a quest to find the answer.

When we first sarted raising quail as a hobby, after having raised chickens while growing up. I really didn't give much thought or preparation into this new venture. Because of not thinking quail would be and different than raising chickens, we ran into many problems.

Due to all these problems, I began to keep a journal of each snag we hit and the way the difficulties were fixed. You name what could go wrong in the area of raising quail, we had to deal with it. Hatch rates, overcrowding, picking, fighting, brooding and disease etc. Some of these things, were fixed by trail and error, having to much pride, to admit that I had no idea what or how to do it.

The journal started filling up quickly, mostly with things that didn't work. It was very hard to come up with information on raising quail when we started out. Then one day, I caught a lucky break, when hearing about a quail breeder. We purchased a few quail from him and would talk about certain problems that we had, which this gentleman was happy to give us different things to try in order to straighten the problems out.

Slowly, but surely our venture began to improve, answers to the problems we had were starting to go in the journal. It reached the point of feeling comfortable talking to this breeder whenever a problem arose. Now my journal started to become sort of like a bible of how to raise quail.

Of course it didn't have every answer in it and never could, because with quail something new can happen at anytime. However, the information contained in it, was more than enough to do a very good job at raising quail. This jounal is what led me to writing the ebook.

Coming from a family that loved to hunt and fish. I came into my first contact with quail while rabbit hunting. Walking through the dense brush cover trying to get a rabbit out, I jumped up a covey of bobwhite. Needless to say I about dirtyed my pants.

I found it quite interesting how they only flew about 30 yards or so and landed. I was ready this time, to scare them up again, but I never did find them.

Where I was raised there was a lot of brush covered ground around us and we could here their bobwhite call all the time. I loved listening to them.

I was reading some kind of hunting and game magazine when I came across an ad to purchase fertile quail eggs for rasing, I cut out the ad and kept it on my dresser just to consider the thought.

After thinking about it a couple days and thinking about the way I was raised. The getting up early to feed a calf that had been just taken away from it's mother and didn't know how to eat on it's own and taking care of chickens.

I thought this is something every kid should experience. It teaches responsibility and could also be fun. My kids were old enough to help and take some responsiblity. So I figured we had an old rabbit coop and I would just get an incubator from the breeder that sold the eggs.

Once we did reach the point of knowing what we were doing, and the quail were producing on a regular basis. It became a joy to all of us, just to watch and listen to the quail.

I started getting a lot more eggs than I wanted to hatch so I tried hard boiling them to see what they would taste like. They really weren't bad at all. So I started taking a bag or two to family outings and work, just to get rid of them. They were such a hit that people started asking me where they could get some.

They ended up taking them to different events that they went to because the eggs being so small are quite unique. This created a nice little snowball effect and I started to make a little side income just from selling eggs to eat.

So that pretty much explains how I got started in the quail business.

My family and I are very dedicated to supporting St. Jude's Research Hospital. I watched this terrible disease take the life out of both of my parents. All the pain and suffering that they went through. We feel that if we can help prevent the children from enduring such suffering we will do what we can. So even if you don't make a purchase from this site please click on this link: http://www.stjude.org/donate
and help the children.


Thanks,
Gary L. Ortlieb

Below are a couple of awards I received in 2010 for articles that I wrote on raising quail that were published on Ezine Articles Site. I am some what proud of these, especially the platinum one.