National Standard Squab Book. 15 
Some of our customers write from places like Oregon and Idaho, where 
there is a wet and a dry season, and are puzzled to know what to do. In 
such cases we say, arrange your buildings as you see poultry houses ar- 
ranged. The pigeons will do as well or better under the same conditions 
as hens and chickens. 
Suppose you have a vacant building or shack of any kind in which you 
wish to raise squabs. "e will take for granted that it has either a flat 
roof or a ridgepole with sloping roof, and that it is ‘built in rectangular 
form. Never mind what the dimensions are; our advice will apply to 
either the large or the small structure. 
First raise it off the ground, or build a new floor off the ground, so that 
rats cannot breed out of your sight in the darkness and get up into the 
squab house. If there is an old floor, patch up all the holes in it. Now 
you need one door, to get yourself in and out of the squab house, and 
you need at least one window through which the pigeons can fly from the 
squab house into the flying pen and back -from the flying pen into the 
house. You will shut this window on ‘cold nights, or on cold winter days. 
You must cover the whole window with wire netting so that the birds 
eannot break the panes of glass by flying against them. If you have no 
wire netting over the window, some of the birds, when it is closed, will 
not figure out for themseles that the glass stops their progress, ‘but will 
bang against the panes at full speed, sometimes hurting their heads and 
dazing them and at other times breaking the glass. 
The flying pen which you will build on the window side of the squab 
house may be as small or as large as you have room. The idea of it is 
not to give the birds an opportunity for long flight, but simply to get 
them out into the open air and sunlight. They enjoy the sun very much 
and it does them good and they court its direct rays all the time. Build 
the flying pen, if you choose, up over the roof, so the birds may sun 
themselves there. If that side of the roof which faces the flying pen is. 
too steep for the pigeons to get a foothold, nail footholds along the roof, 
same as carpenters use when they are shingling a roof, and the pigeons 
will rest on these to sun themselves. For the flying pen you want the 
ordinary poultry netting, either of one-inch or two-inch mesh. The two- 
juch mesh is almost invariably used by squab raisers, because it is very 
much cheaper than the one-inch mesh. ‘The one-inch mesh is used only 
by squab raisers who are afraid that small birds (the English sparrows. 
here in New England) will steal through the large meshes of the two- 
inch netting and eat the grain which you ‘have bought: for the pigeons. 
You can buy this wire netting in rolls of any width from one foot up to 
six feet. If your flying pen is 12 feet high, you should use rolls of the 
six-foot wire. If it is ten feet high, rolls which are five feet wide are 
whut you want. If your flying pen is to be eight feet high, buy rolls 
which are four feet wide. In joining one width of wire netting to its 
neighbor, in constructing your flying pen, do not cut small pieces of tie 
wire and tie them together, for that takes too much time and is a bungling 
