54 NATIONAL STANDARD SQUAB BOOK 
In northern latitudes it is not necessary nor desirable for 
the pigeons to bathe on cold winter days. Wait until a warm 
and sunny day comes. It will do the birds no harm to go 
for weeks in the winter without bathing. Many of our 
customers write us that they allow their birds to bathe in the 
winter seldom or not at all. 
Feed may be given to pigeons in a less guarded way, for 
they do not soil the feed dish so freely as they do the drinking 
dishes. You may put the feed in open troughs (or on a flat 
board with a rim around it) in the squab house. If you 
observe them when eating, you will notice that they stand up 
to the feed in a somewhat orderly manner and peck at its 
contents. They do not sit in the dish and roll around in the 
feed as they do in the water. But they have one fault when 
eating and that is, to scatter the grains. They will push in 
their bills and toss them around in a search after tidbits, and 
scatter out on the floor kernel after kernel, and it will make 
your bump of economy ache to see this grain scattered around. 
There do not seem to be any neat, saving pigeons which go to 
the floor in the wake of their prodigal brethren and eat the 
crumbs. They all have a fancy for the first table and they 
get right at it and scatter the grain like the rest of their fellows, 
and apparently the pigeon who scatters the most grain is the 
one which struts around with the biggest front. The way 
to fool them is to provide in the squab house a covered trough, 
that is, covered except at the slit or points where they stick 
in their bills for food. With a little ingenuity you can cover 
an ordinary v-shaped trough so that it will be hard for the 
pigeons to waste the grain. You may have a self-feeder made 
as big or as small as you choose and in which the grain will 
drop down as it is eaten. 
We will try to present the matter of feed as clearly and 
fully as it seems to us to be possible. A woman in Santa 
Cruz, California, said she would like to raise squabs, and 
would begin by ordering her feed of us, exactly as we recom- 
mended, to be sent to her by freight from Boston via the 
Southern Pacific. A man in Cleveland ordered a quantity of 
red wheat and cracked corn to be sent by freight from us, 
when there were thousands of bushels of both staples in 
elevators in his city, in fact most of the Boston supply had 
passed through his city. We did not like to run the chance of 
