National Standard Squab Book. 23 
clapboard it. You may put a skylight in the roof to let in more sun. Im- 
prove it all you wish. Use your own judgment. 
To get at your pigeons in such a house, you walk in through the door 
and find yourself directly among them, the nest boxes all pointing at you. 
Go to the nest which you wish to investigate or from which you wish to 
take out the squabs and put your hand ip the opening. The old birds will 
fly by your head, perhaps, and may strike you with their wings, but they 
will not fly in your face and eyes, they are good dodgers. Don’t be afraid 
that if you enter the house when the housekeeping is going on you will 
frighten the birds so they never will come back to the eggs or the squabs. 
They will seem timid at first, but they will get.accustomed to you. In the 
course of a few weeks, only a few will make a great hustle to get away 
from you. Many of them will continue to sit contentedly on the eggs and 
if you put up your hand to them they will not fly off in fear but will slap 
you with their wings, telling you in their language not to bother them. 
Carry some hempseed iu with you and you will teach the birds to come 
and eat it out of your hand. You can tame them and teach them to love 
you as any animal is taught. The pigeon, particularly the Homer, the 
king of them ail, is a knowing bird. ci 
Tack up perches where you have room on that wall or those walls of 
the squab house which have no nest boxes. You do not need a perch for 
every pigeon, because while some are ou perches, others are in the nests, 
or out in the flying pen, or on the roof, or on the floor of the squab house. 
If you have 48 pigeons, 20 perches will be enough, and you can get along 
with a dozen. Make each perch of two pieces of board, one six inches 
square, the other six inches by five, and toe-nail the perch to the wall of 
the squab bouse:as shown in the illustration. You cannot have one long 
pole for a pigeon perch. If you had such a pole, and your pigeons were 
perched on it, or some of them were, a bully cock would saunter down the 
line and push off all the others. 
In the centre of the squab house you place an empty crate or over- 
turned box. The object of this is to break the force of the wind made 
by the pigeons’ wings as they fly in and out of the squab house. Other- 
wise the floor of the squab house would be swept clean by the force of 
the wind. It also forms a roosting place for the birds, and finally, it is a 
convenient resting place for the straw, hay and grass out of which the 
pigeons build their nests.’ 
The floor of the squab house should be kept clean. We used to advise 
that a layer of sawdust one inch thick ‘be kept on the floor of the squab 
house, to absorb the droppings, but we have found a steady and profitable 
demand for pigeon manure, and this manure is worth scraping up and 
carefully saving, for its sale wil] pay from one-quarter to one-third of the 
grain bill. Use a hoe to scrape the droppings from the floor, and pack 
the manure away in barrels. Clean the floor about once in three weeks, 
or oftener, depending on the size of your flock. Pigeon manure is in active 
demand all the time by tanneries. We send the manure from our pigeons 
