National Standard Squab Book. 39 
word variety in your mind all the time in dealing with your pigeons. 
Their appetites do not grow keen on a monotonous diet and their health 
will not be good on it. Vary the diet. © 
In order to find out what grains are convenient to you, go to your near- 
est grain dealer or country gencral store. The dealer in nine cases out of 
ten knows nothing about pigeons and their feed and if you give him the 
name of a strange grain, he will be liable to shy and say he never heard 
of it. The trouble with him is that he sells horse feed and is accustomed 
to handling only the grains which horses need. He can get the grains you 
wish by writing to his nearest port or railroad junction. There is nothing 
odd or out of the way~-about the grains. They are going from one point 
to another all the time. Sometimes they are scarce at certain periods of 
the year. For instance, all this summer there has been no kaffir corn at 
a reasonable price obtainable in Boston, so we have not fed it to our 
pigeons, but have cut it out altogether in favor of the grains selling at a 
lower price. Most of the kathir corn which we get in Boston comes from 
Kansas. It is a splendid feed for pigeons. It is small and comparatively 
soft, and their crops make easy work of it. It is nourishing and they like 
it. Maybe your grain man sells a mixture for pigeons. If you will look 
in this mixture you will find probably kaffir corn, as well as buckwheat 
(in black kernels), also red wheat and Canada peas. Do not feed Canada 
peas in great abundance to a house full of squab ‘breeders. We have fed 
a bountiful supply of Canada peas to birds and later on found the crops 
of some of the squabs distended with a great mass of somethiug which on 
examination was found to be whole Canada peas. The parent birds had 
simply filled their own crops with the whole peas, then taken a drink of 
water and gone directly to the young squabs and allowed them to cram 
their crops full. Syuabs are killed by these whole grains which the old 
birds do not take time to properly break up. If you wish to feed Canada 
peas in good measure, pound them up with a mortar and ‘pestle into finer 
form and you will be on the safe side. 
For the same reason, we sumetimes take cracked corn and pound it even 
finer than it is when we buy it. 
Do not feed an excess of corn, particularly in the summer time. (By 
corn, we mean common Indian corn, not kaffir corn. Kaffir corn is harm- 
less, even when forced on the birds.) The effect of corn is to heat the 
blood. This is what you want in the winter time, but not in the summer. 
If fed to excess in the summer time, it will cause canker in the old birds, 
which is a sort of diphtheria, filling their throats with a thick, cheesy-like 
compound, and the throats of some squabs also get filled up in the same 
manner. By an excess of corn, we mean that corn forms the major part 
of the diet. In the summer, feed two parts of red wheat to one part of 
eracked corn. In the winter feed two parts of cracked corn to one part 
of red wheat. In other words, set before the pigeons in the summer 
twice as much red wheat as cracked corn, in the winter time twice as 
much cracked corn as red wheat. 
