CHAPTER I. 



SQUABS PAY. 



Experience of a Customer who Started in January, 1902, 

 Erected a Plant Worth Three Thousand Dollars and Made 

 Money A Imost from the Start — Settlements of Squab Breeders 

 in Iowa, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — 

 Large Incomes Made from Pigeons — Squab Plants Known 

 to be Making Money — The Hard-Working Farmer and the 

 Easy-Working Squab Raiser — No Occupation for a Drone — 

 No Exaggeration. 



" Will it pay me to raise squabs?" is the first question 

 which the beginner asks. We take the case of a man who 

 bought a Manual in January, 1902. His boys had kept a few 

 pigeons but had never handled them in a commercial way, 

 nor tried to make any money with them. The reading of 

 the book gave him the first real light on the squab industry. 

 Possibly he was more ready to beUeve because he knew from 

 his own personal experience that a squab grows to market size 

 in four weeks and is then readily marketable. He started at 

 once to build a squab house according to the directions given. 

 The ground was too hard for him to get a pickaxe into, so 

 he laid the foundation timbers on bricks, rushed the work 

 ahead with the help of good carpenters and sent on his order 

 for breeding stock. In the course of a few weeks he ordered 

 a second lot of breeders, followed by a third and a fourth, 

 and he kept adding new buildings. When spring came and 

 the ground softened, he jacked up his first squab house, took 

 out the bricks at the four comers and put in cedar posts. 

 By the middle of July he had five handsome squab houses 

 and flying pens, all built by skilled labor in the best possible 

 style at a cost of at least three hundred dollars apiece. With 

 his buildings and their fittings and his birds, his plant repre- 

 sented an expenditure of between two thousand and three 

 thousand dollars. 



This gentleman lives in a locality where he had to put up nice- 

 looking buildings, or the neighbors would have complained. 

 He spent probably three times more money on his buildings 



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