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About Me
Gary Ortlieb
I
am a 57 years old and have been married for 34 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 have been doing it ever since. I live just outside the city of Alexandria, Kentucky on one acre of land. So I have plenty of room.
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.
Needless to say the first attemp didn't go to well. But once I received the information I needed, we actually got some really good results. I began this as just a hobby and to teach my children some responsibility.
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
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