160 OUR DOMESTIC FOWLS. 



devouring delicate salads and young sprouting 

 vegetables, a troop of ducks does good service. 

 They are industrious searchers of snails and 

 slugs, wood-lice and millepedes, and gobble 

 them up with great avidity. On snails and 

 slugs they will get positively fat. 



Ducks — and the same observation applies to 

 geese — should have their own exclusive dor- 

 mitories. It is a bad plan to put them into 

 the roosting place of fowls ; they should have 

 tlieir own chamber. In the gardens of the 

 Zoological Society, the waterfowl have boxes, 

 or wooden huts, placed around the margin of 

 their pond, or on little islands in it. The plan 

 answers excellently, but a wire fence forming 

 au inclosure, so as to prevent the ingress of 

 rats and weasels, is, in this case, necessary ; 

 •we do not, however, pretend to recommend the 

 adoption of it under ordinai-y circumstances. 



There are few countries in which ducks are 

 kept in such numbers as in China ; they are 

 there hatched by means of artificial incubation. 

 Numerous possessors of great flocks of these 

 birds keep them in boats on the Canton river, 

 and turn them out at stated times along the 

 banks to feed. They are singulai-ly trained ; 

 when their keeper wishes to call them into the 



