258 MY POULTRY DAY BY DAY 
of the fowl and what troubles they may be laying up in the 
future ? 
Everyone is naturally anxious to curtail the moulting season, 
so that eggs will begin to flow quickly and copiously, but one 
doubts whether we can, after all, cheat Nature with impunity. 
Some hens that possess excessive vitality will continue to lay 
during part or even all the moulting period, and with such it would 
not be wisdom to interfere, even if we could ; but these are excep- 
tions that are not to be held up to illustrate the natural order of 
things. Most of us poultrymen are always greedy for eggs. Like 
Oliver Twist, we always cry for more. But if our fowls are good 
enough to keep on laying for eight or nine months continuously, 
we need not grudge them the little interval for rest and refresh- 
ment that Mother Nature imposes upon them. 
To me it is always an amazing fact that a pullet will go on laying, 
day in, day out, for nearly 300 days out of 365 without, apparently, 
getting tired of the creative habit. I often go to the laying nests 
saying to myself: “‘ They cannot give me 50, 60, 100 eggs to-day,” 
but, sure enough, there lie the eggs, white and brown, waiting to 
be collected. A careful selection of deep-laying strains has given 
man not merely a bird, but a laying machine. 
The modern hen, developed through succeeding generations, 
has formed the diurnal egg-laying habit, and it would take nothing 
less than a miracle to choke her off. She lives to lay. And while 
the hen is moulting the six-months-old pullet is thinking seriously 
of beginning her life’s work. Many January pullets are laying 
then, but it will be two or three more months before the March 
bird has seriously begun to fill the egg basket. 
It is the aim of the poultryman to bridge over the interval be- 
tween the moulting-time of the older bird and the beginning of 
the laying season of the six to eight month pullet. If this could 
be done successfully there would really be no scarcity of eggs and 
no winter problem. It is not so much the cold that prevents birds 
laying in winter. The great famine in eggs during the last three 
months of the year is due to the fact that while the older hens have 
ceased to lay the younger generation are not sufficiently matured 
