AN 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 
lass. 
‘ 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 
