1906.] 



Poultry-yard Fittings. 



273 



a few shovelfuls of this under the roost every morning. In this 

 way the excrement is covered up and partly absorbed, and thus 

 rendered odourless, so that the floor beneath the roost need 

 not be cleaned out oftener than once a month. It is not 

 necessary that the two sections of the floor should be divided 

 by a board if the door and the windows are all in the front of 

 the house, because hens invariably scratch with their heads 

 towards the light, and hence they throw a certain quantity 

 of the outside litter back under the roosts every day. 



Perches. — When the perch extends from one side or end of the 

 house to the other it may rest simply on strips of wood about one 



Fig. I. — Support for Ends of Perches, Screwed to Wall. 



and a half inches thick and four inches deep, having square 

 notches cut in them to hold the end of the perch, and these may 

 be fastened to the walls of wooden houses by screwing them in 

 in the manner shown in Fig. i. It is not necessary to have 

 a support in the middle, even though the perch is twelve or 

 fourteen feet long, provided the perch is of fair substance and 

 of proper shape — deeper than it is wide. Opinions differ greatly 

 as to the most desirable shape of perch, and the class or breed 

 of fowl must be taken into account. 



Heavy fowls require a wider perch than light ones, and for birds 

 of the average farm class — say, Wyandotte size — a roost two and 

 a quarter inches wide is suitable. If the length of a perch of 

 this thickness were twelve feet, it would need to be five inches 



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