^A^ EASY START 23 



the cold winters, but in the South the buildings are more open. 

 Be guided by what you see around you in the place where you 

 live. If the houses used by your friends and neighbors for 

 hens and chickens are tight and warm, make your squab 

 house tight and warm. It would be foolish for you, for 

 example, if you live in Texas, to build a strong, tight, close 

 squab house, for in that latitude, in a henhouse built tight 

 and close, vermin would swarm and harass the chicks, and 

 they would harass the squabs just as fast. 



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 arranged. The pigeons 

 will do as well 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. We 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 cannot 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 themselves 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 sun- 

 light. They enjoy the sun very much, it does them good 



