18 



Now, if a person ^vill pick up a bird and score the bird 

 according to the comb texture, the shank color, the ear lobe 

 color and the moulting condition, without ever trap nesting 

 his birds at all, and do this at the right time of the year, — 

 in the months of September or October or November, when the 

 bird is susceptible to all these climatic changes that cause her 

 to cease to lay, and when only the good hens will lay, — he 

 will be able to pick out and eliminate from his flock the low- 

 producing birds with surprising accuracy. He can then keep 

 the high-producing birds and classify them in those three 

 groups, as I will show you from the figures that are to follow. 

 I wanted, however, to get this point clear in your mind, so that 

 you can go home and put this thing into practice, if you care 

 to. Now remember that in scoring these birds the lower 

 the score the bird gets the better she is; the higher the score 

 she gets the poorer she is. Whenever you score a bird with 

 those four characteristics, the highest possible score you could 

 get would be 5 in each one of these, which would be 20; the 

 lowest possible score would be 4; she would be 1 in comb tex- 

 ture, 1 in shank color, — that is to say, she would have 1 in 

 comb texture, a very bright red and a pliable, soft comb; she 

 would have 1 in pink or white shanks, indicating that she had 

 laid for a long while and was still laying; if she had ceased to 

 lay the color would have begun to have come back in her 

 shanks again. An enameled-white ear lobe will count one, and 

 if she has all her old feathers that also will count one. That 

 score will show she is a high-producing bird. If, on the other 

 hand, she had a very hard, dry comb, 5; orange-colored shanks, 

 5; if she had yellow ear lobes, 5; if she had completed her 

 moult and had all new plumage, 5; you could put that hen 

 down absolutely as a very, very low-producing hen. 



To prove to you that this method of scoring birds works out 

 in practice, I will give you the figures on three lots of Leghorn 

 yearlings at the college farm which we scored in this way. We 

 had trap-nest experiments on several hundred birds, and we 

 picked out the twelve highest, the twelve medium and the 

 twelve lowest producing birds, according to our office records. 

 Now the egg records of these birds were 210, 207, 199, 198, 

 188, 188, 200, 208, 188, 193, 188 and 179; and on the points I 



