38 CALIFORNIA POULTRY PRACTICE 



After that clean them out every day and they will pay you back in 

 quick healthy growth of the chicks. 



Don't Fill the brooder box or hover with fine dust or dirt. It 

 gets in the chicks' lungs, gives them canker in mouth, and is altogether 

 wrong. The best way I ever found to keep a brooder clean was to 

 spread burlap on the floor, fit it in corners as you would a board, 

 then put nice fine cut litter over the burlap. When you want to 

 clean out just draw out the burlap take it out doors and shake the 

 contents off. By having two pieces of burlap one can be washed and 

 hung on the fence to dry while the other is in use. Or, if you have no 

 litter, just sprinkle clean sand over the burlap. This saves dust, 

 saves time, and better still it saves the floor from getting such a 

 strong chicken odor. 



Don't And this is the biggest don't and should be printed in red 

 letters: "Don't overcrowd." All brooders, hovers, etc., are sold with 

 a capacity that is very much overstated, in the first place, and no 

 allowance is made for the growth of the chicks. The capacity is for 

 day old chicks, and as the manufacturers have to sell in competition 

 with others that are so rated, we cannot blame them. Then the 

 poultry man happens to have a matter of fifty chicks or so extra, and 

 he puts them in and his brooder is now carrying nearly double what 

 it was rated at. By the time the c'hicks are two weeks old they 

 commence dying, not from lack of room perhaps, but for lack of 

 something more vital air. Even if the chicks live, some of them 

 will be stunted and will be more or less of a loss. 



Overcrowding is not a question of room only; in fact the room 

 is secondary. The vital point is in the "quantity of air." If there is 

 air for fifty chicks and one hundred are put in, don't you see that 

 every chick is being robbed of just half the air it should have to 

 keep it in health and strength? 



I have seen chicks come out of brooders so weak they could not 

 stand. At that time I did not realize what caused the weakness; the 

 knowledge came later. 



Under natural conditions all varieties of land and water fowl are 

 hatched and brooded in small groups or families, and sometimes in 

 lean years, air is the biggest asset they have; but with plenty of fresh 

 air and a little picking here and there and the warmth of the mother 

 hen the little broods manage to grow into lusty youngsters, and there 

 is no such thing as their "going light." That condition is left for the 

 brooder chick that has been robbed of its pure air. With properly 

 ventilated brooders, we can improve on the natural method of brood- 

 ing so far as numbers, but when one thousand chicks are confined in 

 a space where there is only air for five hundred, there is something 

 wrong. 



