National Standard Squab Book. 41 
White wheat fed to pigeons here in New England causes scours or 
diarrhoea, but we have customers in the West who write us that they are 
feeding white wheat with no bad effects. Use red wheat and you are ab- 
solutely sure that your pigeons will not have diarrhoea. 
All the grains which you feed should be old, hard, dry and sweet. If 
they smell sour or taste bad to your own tongue, don’t feed them to your 
pigeons. Above all, keep your grain dry. If you have the grain stored in 
bins which are damp from ground water, or which catch the drippings 
from the eaves, or through holes in the roof, first you will get sour grain 
and then some of the grain will sprout, and this sprouted grain will de- 
range the bowels of your birds and bring on dysentery. Do not let rank 
little growths spring up in a dirty squab house or in the yard of your 
flying pen. Pigeons will peck at green leaves and grass and will not be 
harmed, but do not give them a chance to peck up sprouted grain and eat 
the sprout, grain and ail, for if they do they will have diarrhoea. A 
pigeon in good condition and busy with a nest ordinarily will not touch a 
nasty little green sprout, but in the moulting season, when pigeons are in 
the dumps generally, and feeling like having a stimulant, they will experi- 
ment with these sprouts. Keep the floor of your squab house clean and 
ihe yard of the flying pen raked up and you need not worry about this 
matter. 
Ground oyster shell should be piaced in a box handy for the pigeons to 
get at. The purpose of this oyster shell is to provide the constituents of 
the eggshell. The female pigeon needs it in order to form the egg. 
Grit is needed by the pigeons to enable them to reduce to powder the 
feed which they take into their crops. Tle muscles of the crop work 
the grit on the grains and reduce the grains so that they mix with the di- 
gestive fluids. There are special grits on the market advertised and for 
sale at reasonable prices, but if there is a gravel bank near you, or a 
deposit of fine sand, you do not need to buy grit. Simply cart two or 
three bushels of the fine gravel or sand into your flying pen and cover the 
ground with it. It is not necessary to cover the whole space of the ground 
of the flying pen with grit. Some breeders use pounded glass. 
It is poor policy to mix anything but red wheat and cracked corn to- 
gether. If you make a mixture of peas and hempseed with cracked corn 
and red wheat, you will find that the pigeons will dig down after the peas 
and hempseed and toss the other grain around and waste it. The only 
mixture, therefore, which we feed is a mixture of red wheat and cracked 
eorn. According to the advice we have given, we take a grain scoop or 
any measure, and in the summer time mix two parts of red wheat to one 
of cracked corn; in the winter, two parts of cracked. corn to one of red 
wheat. 
We call the red wheat and cracked corn staples, because with us in 
New England it forms the major part of the diet, and is the cheapest. 
The hemp seed, buckwheat, Canada peas, kaffir corn and millet we call 
dainties. We do not feed much millet, because we have the other grains, 
