60 THE NA TURE-STUD Y RE VIE W [6:3-Mar.. 1910 



teria grow best in neutral or alkaline media and so sour milk 

 and sour curds are good to alternate with custards. If there 

 is no black-head disease, or other fowl ailment about, the 

 chicks may be permitted to forage for themselves about the 

 lawn and gardens. If the ground has been contaminated with 

 disease germs, they cannot be reared with hens and must be 

 cared for in brooders and allowed to run and forage only 

 where barnyard fowls do not go. 



In brooders, with careful feeding and strict cleanliness, 

 bobwhite chicks can be reared as easily as bantams. They 

 grow rapidly and need very little care beyond the first month. 

 They tame readily, and if, for the first weeks, a whistle is used 

 consistently while caring for them, they soon come to answer 

 it and follow it as they would the call of a parent. After rang- 

 ing out and filling their crops they will fly home to the whistle 

 from a distance of several hundred yards until late in the fall 

 and they are practically full grown. To give the call, hear thq 

 cheerful answer and suddenly have the air filled with whirring 

 wings about your head as the flock alights at your feet, is a de- 

 lightful experience which T hope all my readers may enjoy with 

 flocks of their own. I had fully expected to be obliged to 

 pinion or clip their wings as they began to use them, but the 

 little charmers richly repaid me for not doing so. I am al- 

 ways careful, however, to have the home cage the most com- 

 fortable place they can find. There is always fresh water, and 

 their seed mixture to scratch over, a little pile of brush and 

 weeds for cover — they love cover as ducks love water — and, 

 above all, a tray of fine warm dust. A place with all these at- 

 tractions is a "home" rather than a *'cage", and the birds learn 

 to depend upon it. 



I give these hints about rearing the chicks for just one 

 reason. Thousands of nests are cut over or disturbed and de- 

 serted every year in the harvest and hay field, and with know- 

 ledge of the great value of the birds and of how to rear the 

 chicks, the boys and girls of the country might have many of 

 these eggs, now wasted, start a race of tame bobwhites, work 

 everywhere for intelligent conservation of the birds., and within 

 ten years have them, properly appreciated and protected, in 

 every garden and farm in, at least, the natural range of the 

 species. Is it too much to ask of nature-study that it do just 

 this for the Country and for the bobwhite? 



