POULTRIY-CRAFT. 133 
of being over-careful to prevent laying hens walking on and eating snow. It 
is often said that either of these things will stop laying. To remain long 
standing on snow, or on wet frozen ground either, undoubtedly has that 
effect; so, apparently, has eating snow uwzder some circumstances. Healthy 
fowls that have dry comfortable quarters to which they go at will, are not 
injured in the least by being on snow for a little while occasionally. Fowls 
that can have water to drink when they want it will not hurt themselves 
eating snow. Indeed, fowls provided with water do not voluntarily eat much 
snow except when it is thawing, wet ; — then they seem to prefer it to water. 
176. As the Days Grow Short — the old hens are getting well through 
their moult; the early pullets are completely feathered, full grown. The 
food eaten now goes to maintenance, warmth, and eggs; and, with the full 
coat of feathers on, the heat of the body is better retained. A given quantity 
of fuel food will go further in a given atmospheric temperature now than it 
did earlier; and if the weather is fine and warm in November, the food needs 
close watching ; for it is very likely to prove that the hens need less food and 
less heating food now than they did early in the fall. Now, too, the days are 
growing so short that it begins to be difficult to get in three meals a day, even 
if the noon meal is a light one, with intervals between meals long enough to 
keep the fowls in good appetite. It would seem that fowls need to be up 
and about for a while before they are ready to eat a breakfast. If at all well 
fed at night they rarely eat a hearty meal until some little time after sunrise. 
Ii the hens will not eat heartily soon after sunrise, the evening feed should be 
reduced, little by little, until they do. A good way to feed in the short days 
is — when the mash is fed in the morning — to give all they will eat clean of 
a clover or vegetable mash, and scatter millet, or other small grain or broken 
grain, where they can get it by scratching at any time through the day; then 
about three o’clock in the afternoon give a feed of wheat, oats, barley, cracked 
corn,— any one, or a mixture —in litter, feeding a little light; at dusk give 
whole corn to hens that will leave the roost to get it. As to the quantity of 
corn to be given, learn to judge that by comparing the appearance of the crop 
at night and the appetite for mash next morning. When the mash is fed in 
the evening and vegetables at noon, it is easier to regulate three meals a day. 
Whether two or three meals are given, the feeder should learn to so regulate 
the quantity given at each meal that the hens will be ready and waiting for 
the next. If this is not done, hens soon go ‘‘ off their feed,” though not 
over-fed. The trouble usually has its origin in allowing the fowls to get too 
hungry before the evening meal, making them so greedy that when given an 
opportunity to eat rapidly and heartily they swallow more than they can 
comfortably digest. By being observant and careful, one soon acquires a 
knack of feeding about right for quantity, and finds it a much simpler matter 
than the amount of explanation necessary to make the need of cautious feeding 
clear would indicate. 
