Okay, Jimmy, to answer your question the first thing is: I'm sorry, but I meant to say I am now feeding JUVENILE quail. (Yes, I've given her a couple every once in a while now. I've also seen birds labeled as "button quail", and they were tiny, but because I don't know where they come from I don't know if they would be in the corn's range. They might be totally unnatural to poor Angel, who might end up getting beat up by the mini bird. So I give her infant quail
To bmm and pinatamonkey: I sometimes feed different prey items because a) my snake loves it, and always happily eats mice when I ask her to, even after the occasinal quial egg or lizard and b) it only seems natural to give her different things. To quote the Loves -
"Our favorite culprit is the syndrome of captivity that could be dubbed 'limited freedom of choice.' It ends up working its way into a large percentage of the answers we give to people by phone and print. Simply put, MOST captive situations (we're including the bulging ranks of new people keeping corn snakes in our assesment of MOST) do not offer the voluntary range of daily environmental choices available in the wild."
Considering that this quote came from the chapter about Diseases and Disorders, under the title of "Stress and the Unknown," I think its safe to assume that giving corns a slight variety of diet will do them no harm. You also have to remember that I have given my snake a vet check after I started varying her diet, and he gave the full "go-ahead" with breeding. She was perfectly fine.
Yeah, corns do fine on a diet of mice and rats. But hey, I know people who, every day for the entire school year, eat a sandwhich and a drink. That's it. I've been to summer camps where every breakfast, someone would have Frosted Flakes; every lunch, they had macaroni and cheese; and every dinner, they had soup and some bread. That was what they had EVERY DAY for months on end. Yeah, they did fine. Yeah, they were happy and energized every day. But don't you think that they would have appreciated a CHANGE? I know my snake is always delighted to wander upon the eggs I hide in her cage. (I have now gotten another hide, which I put the eggs on top of so she doesn't eay aspen. It takes her a full fifteen minutes sometimes to crawl around and find them)
So I geuss all I can say as to bmm's question of "why do it?" is that my pet is loving the heck out of it, is healthy and I just think it is more interesting giving her diff things. I'm not positive, but I would say that it helps to keep her exercising. She's a very active hunter, on the ground and (especially) in the trees. My own particular corn adores climbing, so if she were in the wild I assume that she would wander upon some bird eggs or chicks every now and then.