THE PIGEON BOOK 125 



every morning in picking up all the droppings. The 

 handiest little article that I have found for this job is a 

 small hand cinder sieve, which can be purchased from 

 any ironmongery shop at the small cost of 6d. It is in 

 the shape of a shovel, with a wire handle, and mesh of a 

 quarter of an inch, which will permit the sawdust to 

 quickly run through and retain the droppings only. The 

 latter can be thrown into a bucket and at once taken out 

 of the loft. The next item to consider is perches, and 

 after testing all sorts I have come to the conclusion that 

 the bracket pattern is the best for both clean and muffed 

 legs. These are to be bought from most of the pigeon 

 appliance makers, and consist of an iron bracket, which is 

 screwed on the side of the loft and surmounted by a round 

 piece of wood for the bird to stand on. See that you get 

 a good long bracket so as to project about twelve inches 

 from the wall, thus enabling the bird to easily turn round 

 without scraping its flights and tail against the wall. The 

 only drawback to the bracket perch is that they require a 

 lot of wall space, as they cannot be placed one under an- 

 other for fear of the top bird soiling on the underneath 

 one. If loft accommodation is limited and a lot of birds 

 are being kept, which necessitates having more than one 

 tier of perches, then I recommend those known as the box- 

 perch. These can easily be made at home by simply 

 running a shelf along the back of the loft and dividing 

 it up in equal distances of about twelve inches apart, with 

 wooden partitions, thus forming like a set of small boxes. 

 A second or third shelf can be fixed underneath and 

 divided in the same way. With this arrangement the top 

 birds cannot soil those underneath, whilst a large quantity 

 of birds can be accommodated in a small space, although 

 this is not advisable for any length of time, as nothing is 

 more likely to cause disease amongst the stock than over- 



