54 NATIONAL STANDARD SQUAB BOOK 



In northern latitudes it is not necessary nor desirable for 

 the pigeons to bathe on cold winter days. Wait until a warm 

 and sunny day comes. It will do the birds no harm to go 

 for weeks in the winter without bathing. Many of our 

 customers write us that they allow their birds to bathe in the 

 winter seldom or not at all. 



Feed may be given to pigeons in a less guarded way, for 

 they do not soil the feed dish so freely as they do the drinking 

 dishes. You may put the feed in open troughs (or on a flat 

 board with a rim around it) in the squab house. If you 

 observe them when eating, you will notice that they stand up 

 to the feed in a somewhat orderly manner and peck at its 

 contents. They do not sit in the dish and roll around in the 

 feed as they do in the water. But they have one fault when 

 eating and that is, to scatter the grains. They will push in 

 their bills and toss them around in a search after tidbits, and 

 scatter out on the floor kernel after kernel, and it will make 

 your bump of economy ache to see this grain scattered around. 

 There do not seem to be any neat, saving pigeons which go to 

 the floor in the wake of their prodigal brethren and eat the 

 crumbs. They all have a fancy for the first table and they 

 get right at it and scatter the grain like the rest of their fellows, 

 and apparently the pigeon who scatters the most grain is the 

 one which struts around with the biggest front. The way 

 to fool them is to provide in the squab house a covered trough, 

 that is, covered except at the slit or points where they stick 

 in their bills for food. With a little ingenuity you can cover 

 an ordinary v-shaped trough so that it will be hard for the 

 pigeons to waste the grain. You may have a self-feeder made 

 as big or as small as you choose and in which the grain will 

 drop down as it is eaten. 



We will try to present the matter of feed as clearly and 

 fully as it seems to us to be possible. A woman in Santa 

 Cruz, California, said she would like to raise squabs, and 

 would begin by ordering her feed of us, exactly as we recom- 

 mended, to be sent to her by freight from Boston via the 

 Southern Pacific. A man in Cleveland ordered a quantity of 

 red wheat and cracked corn to be sent by freight from us, 

 when there were thousands of bushels of both staples in 

 elevators in his city, in fact most of the Boston supply had 

 passed through his city. We did not like to run the chance of 



