Orlando Sentinel
Sunday, May 31, 1970
By: JACKIE VAN HOOSE
Staff Writer
400 hens and 100 roosters make a house full of quail for anybody.
But for Mack Gilliam, it's just one of many avocations he pursues while operating a world famous barbecue restaurant on US 1 in Volusia county.
"Houseful" is exactly descriptive of "Gil's" bird abode. Inside a snake garden, surrounded by an office, an apartment for people, an apartment for quail .
Gill is at his regular business at 6:30 AM to build the barbecue fires and get other things rolling.
But at nine in the morning, he slips across the street - where his avocations are conveniently set up - to check his latest project - the quail.
He doesn't hunt, golf or fish, this Mack Gilliam.
But his apparent intrigue with nature got him into the quail business, plus a suggestion from a friend that he might like it.
Last September he boned up on birds, bought 25, built cages, arrange the picture-widowed room with necessary equipment including two incubators got a supply of feed and was in for some fun.
When the first batch of birds was hatched under 100 to 102° temperature in 16 days, Gill found his family or partridge like birds (but much smaller) had multiplied just the way he planned.
"Out of 100 eggs you get about 45 or 50 birds and you lose about five or six birds - maybe week or deformed - out of that 50" Gil said.
The incubated eggs have to be turned three times a day. Gill Demonstrated by gently rolling with his hand the azure white and brown, beige, oval shaped, smaller than-chicken eggs.
Aside from turning the eggs, the cage quail must be fed and watered twice a day and newly hatched birds placed in another room under proper warming lights and observed from time to time.
The undomesticated, quail, trample the weaker ones and often turn vulture like when one of their kind dies.
Not all the quiet not all the eggs go into producing more quail. Gill displays pickled eggs. "You can eat them as hors d'oeuvres" he says.
"250 eggs will boil in eight minutes then I soak them in vinegar to help break the shells. I use a solution of vinegar, spices, and beet juice for pickling "Gill explained.
The snake garden is another advocation of Gil's.