; 1912. 
the; RURAb NEW-YORKER 
841 
The Henyard. 
THE EGG-LAYING CONTEST. 
During the thirty-sixth, week of the con¬ 
test at Storrs College 1853 eggs were laid, 
a gain of 51 eggs over the previous week. 
White Leghorns came to the front this week, 
capturing first, second and third places for 
the week ending July 9. Paul Colbron’s 
pen takes first place with a score of 29. 
Toms Poultry Farm second place with 28, 
and three pens of White Leghorns tie for 
third place with a score of 27 each. They 
are the pens of Cullencross Farm, Mar- 
wood Poultry Farm, and Conyers Farm, of 
Greenwich, Conn. The Barred Rocks of 
Top Notch Farm also laid 27. F. G. Yost’s 
White Leghorns keep up their lead and 
gain live eggs over the English pen, their 
production for the week being 2G, the Eng¬ 
lish pen, the total score to date being 
774 by Yost’s pen, 743 by the English pen. 
That the four birds in the latter pen 
should be able to hold! second place so long 
is remarkable, but the handicap of four 
against five is too much; they must soon 
lose their present position in the record, 
for Marwood Poultry Farm is only nine 
eggs behind, their score being 734. Other 
high scores are White Rose Poultry Farm, 
720; Susie Abbott, 701. These are all 
White Leghorns. Beulah Farms White 
Wyandottes score 723. This is the only 
breed outside of the White Leghorns that 
has reached the 700 mark. 
In the egg-laying contest which is being 
held in Missouri under the charge of Mr. 
T. E. Quisenbury, the White Leghorns in¬ 
stead of leading all other breeds as they do 
here, take the sixth place. The leading 
pen are Rose Comb R. I. Reds, and their 
total up to June 30 was 708, which was 40 
eggs less than Yost's White Leghorns on 
that date. The other high scores in Mis¬ 
souri are the Black Orpingtons, which take 
second place with 687 eggs to their credit; 
White Wyandottes third, with a record of 
678; Silver Wyandottes, fourth, with 666; 
Barred Rocks, fifth, with 662, and the 
White Leghorns, sixth, with 659. The best 
layer in the Missouri contest is a. two-year- 
old White Plymouth Rock hen ; her record 
is 179 eggs up to June 30. For 82 con¬ 
secutive days she laid every day without a 
break, then skipped one day and began 
again. This hen was bred from a cock and 
hen that were winners at some of the best 
shows in the West; showing that standard- 
bred fancy stock can be also good utility 
stock, if the fanciers do not set some fool¬ 
ish standard to breed them to, as they have 
with White Wyandottes. With the latter 
breed the fanciers have endeavored to 
shorten the body, so that the depth from 
back to keel will equal the distance from 
front to rear, the idea being to have the 
body enclosed in a circle, instead of a 
parallelogram. With the White Rocks, the 
parallelogram has been the ideal shape, and 
White Rocks are making good records at 
both contests. 
The Missouri record is beaten by the 
Buff Orpington pullet No. 1 of O. Wilson’s, 
which has laid 204 eggs up to July 9. Dis¬ 
counting nine eggs for the nine days since 
June 30, it would leave her record 195, as 
against 179 for the Missouri hen. Good 
records have been made at Storrs by indi¬ 
vidual birds among the Barred and White 
Rocks, White Wyandottes, Single and Rose 
Comb R. I. Reds, and notably by White 
Leghorns. The latter breed in the East 
seems to surpass its Western sisters in egg 
production. The preference of the great 
New York market for white eggs has led 
to the development of Leghorns for market 
eggs, and nearly all the large commercial 
plants keep that breed only. In San, Fran¬ 
cisco it is the same; in the market there 
one will see a thousand white eggs to one 
brown egg. Petaluma, which largely sup¬ 
plies the “Frisco-” market, keeps White Leg¬ 
horns by the hundred thousand, every 
ranch numbering their birds not by so 
many “hundreds”—as we do here—but by 
the thousand. Egg production is almost 
the only business of the entire community 
in and around Petaluma. There is no other 
town in the United States which makes egg 
production its exclusive business to the ex¬ 
tent that Petaluma does. 
GEO. A. COSGROVE. 
Questions in Hen Management. 
How large a house would I require to 
house 300 hens (mostly It. I. Reds) for 
laying purposes, and what is the best ma¬ 
terial to use in building said house? Are 
partitions necessary, and if so how many 
and what kind? Is it right to feed hens 
with all the mangels they can eat? Is lish 
good for young chickens if boiled? 
Long Island. u. b. m. 
A house to accommodate 300 fowls 
should have about 1200 square feet of ltoor 
space, and a building 20x60 feet, with a 
rear wall five feet in height and the front 
one eight feet would be in good proportion. 
The best material to use is the one that 
can be purchased for the least money in 
your market. Wood, stone, concrete and 
building tile are all suitable building ma¬ 
terials, but it will usually be found that 
wood is the most economical when the cost 
of labor is also taken into account. If the 
walls are made of matched stuff, one thick¬ 
ness of boards is amply sufficient in your 
latitude, and, indeed, much farther north. 
A tightly boarded roof, covered with any 
good quality of prepared roofing will be 
found satisfactory. Partitions are not 
necessary, but may be used to divide the 
building into three equal sized rooms if de¬ 
sired. They may be made of boards, poul¬ 
try netting, or burlap, but in any case 
should be boarded up tight for at least 
two feet from the floor. After becoming 
accustomed to them, fowls may have all the 
mangels that they will eat. unless they 
show by looseness of the bowels that they 
are eating too much of them. Roiled fresh 
fish is a suitable food for poultry, though 
great care should he used that tainted fish 
are not used. It is thought by some that 
fish impart a disagreeable flavor to the eggs 
when fed to laying hens. m. b. d. 
Laying Hens the Second Year. 
Have you any information as to the 
profitableness of keeping White Leghorn 
hens for a second year’s laying? I have 
about 500 birds that are now a little over 
a year old. Would they be likely to moult 
early enough to begin laying during the 
Winter? With a small flock my experience 
has been that such birds do riot begin to 
lay until February. If this flock were kept 
and did not lay till February they would 
not be likely to be profitable, except under 
unusual conditions, such as a shortage of 
stock, which some poultry magazines are 
predicting. I understand that the large 
egg farms use pullets only for their market 
eggs, though I am not sure ou this point 
Maryland. M, p. l. 
It is the custom of at least the majority 
of poultrymen to keep their bens through 
two years of laying, and I believe that it 
is generally conceded it would not be 
profitable to attempt to replace the entire 
flock of layers each year, unless one had 
facilities for disposing of the yearlings at 
an exceptional price. It is even thought 
by some that hens may be profitably kept 
through their third season, but this is cer¬ 
tainly not the general practice. If yearling 
hens are as carefully fed and cared for 
through their moulting period as when they 
are producing eggs, they should begin lay¬ 
ing before February, but the temptation to 
save a little on feed bills when the hens 
are not laying is pretty strong, and. as a 
result, the majority of hens do not begin 
laying, after moulting, as soon as they 
night. It takes “nerve” to feed hens prop¬ 
erly, with grain at its present high level. 
M. B. D. 
A Few Good Hens. 
We started out l«*st July with six Buff 
Wyandotte hens. We averaged four eggs a 
day up to December 1. At that time we 
bought 12 Barred Rock pullets, hatched in 
March, and that with one old B. P. R. hen 
and three chickens given to us by a friend 
has been our entire stock. They were 
placed in our oid chicken house and we 
built a large yard and scratching shed for 
them. We fed them regularly and well. 
Since January 7 they have been laying con¬ 
stantly. Up to July 1 they had laid 1212 
eggs, 101 dozen, which we have used as we 
needed them and sold the rest, averaging 
33 cents a dozen. We have cleared above 
the price of their feed since January— 
$16.95—beside eating five hens, for which 
around here we would have to pay at least 
$1 apiece; they weighed over 4^4 pounds. 
Not having much room we have raised only 
20 little chicks, for which we bought the 
settings of eggs. Two hens brought them 
out and one hen raised them, and we have 
not lost one. They hatched out early in 
April and are all big, fine, healthy chicks. 
For the year beginning last July we have 
made $14.90 above the cost of the chickens, 
their feed, yard and settings of eggs. We 
have 16 grown hens and 20 young chickens 
yet. We are not farmers > we live in a vil¬ 
lage where we have to buy everything ex¬ 
cept what we can raise in a garden the size 
of a good big rug. So we think our chick¬ 
ens have done well. We also like the fowls, 
which give a good meal when dressed and 
served better than the smaller breeds. We 
think if given plenty of room, opportunity 
and incentive (such as grain in litter) to 
exercise, that they lay very well. B. O. 
Rockland Lake, N. Y. 
Sore Eyes in Pigeons. 
My nomer pigeons suffer from sore eyes. 
Around the outer edge of the eye a small 
lump appears, later the whole eye becomes 
all lumps, finally the eye closes. The other 
eye becomes affected the same way, and 
finally the bird dies. What is the trouble? 
New Jersey. J. f. k. 
I have had one or two cases of this 
sort and believe it is similar to “sore eyes” 
in chickens. I would bathe the eyes with 
water and a little hydrogen dioxide and 
then anoint with carbolated vaseline. The 
trouble appears when the bird is in poor 
condition, as is often the case at moulting 
time and you should seek to prevent it 
rather than to cure. Even if the birds 
recover they seldom amount to much,' and 
I would not raise breeders from them. At 
moulting time give them plenty of sound 
grain and a little hemp seed x-egularly. 
R. B. 
Brooder and Drinking Cup. 
The sad experience of many of those 
who have tried some of the “systems,” set 
me to doing a lot of thinking. Now I have 
hit upon one kind of a homemade affair 
that, in warm weather, works well. From 
April to April our climate is so changeable 
that one has to be alert, or a single night 
may ruin his prospects. When the outside 
weather is suitable for the chicks to be 
out, this fireless will be found equal to any. 
Take a flour barrel or an apple barrel, one 
without much bulge. Saw it in two, nail 
the hoops to all the staves so they will 
not drop out; cut off four inches of all 
staves but four, for corner ones, or legs. 
Take for hover cloth old trousers, old coats 
or flannels, about five inches wide, and 
tack around the barrel where the staves are 
cut, cutting up two inches and about 
every three inches. Take the top hoop and 
fit inside and sew, or tack a ronnd piece 
of burlap on it. Nail this up 3% or four 
inches from ground, or floor. Then cut 
some round pieces of outing flannel or more 
burlap, to use for extra bedding for the 
chicks when weather is cold. We had 
some out of door brooders from which we 
removed the .floor and galvanized iron. Iq 
these we put this barrel hover, putting a 
wide board down and covering the floor with 
plenty of sand. We have put as many as 
50 little chicks in one of these. When 
three or four weeks old we take away the 
brooder and put a little coop with wire- 
screened door in its place. There is no 
chance of the chicks being overheated, and 
they can have sufficient covers to keep them 
comfortable, when the temperature goes to 
freezing outside. We have four of these 
in commission now and they seem to fill 
the hill complete. 
There is nothing like necessity to quicken 
one’s wits. We were looking for drinking 
fountains but the hardware man was all 
out of stock. We needed them right off. 
Our tin man has been used up with rheu¬ 
matism and not able to do that kind of 
work. When explaining our needs we saw 
some tin pieplates, and remembering that 
the wife had a lot of empty lard pails, 
the five-pound size, the idea came to us to 
utilize a few. Take off the bail, invert them 
into a pieplate and with a rod mark the 
depth of plate on pail. Then with a nail 
and hammer, punch five or six holes just 
inside of the mark. Fill with water, place 
pieplate on top and with a twist turn 
them over. These will need filling but 
once a day for 40 or 50 chicks, and they 
will have water before them all the time. 
Massachusetts. w. t. wallis. 
Scaly Legs on Chicks. 
Regarding scaly logs on chickens, I will 
add my cry “for the sake of the biddies” 
the same as G. W. P., page 790. I was 
told to try coal oil for the disease men¬ 
tioned, and according to directions, took 
a can and putting about a pint of oil 
into it, dipped the chickens’ legs as far as 
about an inch short of the feathers. In 
about two days my hens showed every sign 
of suffering intensely. I dipped their legs 
into olive oil repeatedly, as they looked all 
scorched and blistered, and it was two 
weeks before they looked at all well. The 
chickens had been laying but from the time 
of the dipping, all eggs ceased for two 
weeks. Most of my hens got well but 
there were some that seemed to drag around 
and could not walk uprigoit. I shut them 
from the rest and the place in which they 
were confined was very offensive to the 
me 11. One day I lifted up one hen to see 
if there was anything I could do*for it, 
and to my horror, my fingers sank right 
into toe flesh between the thighs and body. 
It was completely rotten. I had to kill 
many of my hens to end their sufferings. 
I conclude that the oil had eaten into the 
feathers and later into the flesh. I hope 
never to see anything like it again and for 
that l'eason would like to warn anyone 
against using coal oil alone. I have since 
used the oil mixed with a small quantity 
of carbolic acid and plenty of lard and 
found it effective. MRS. p. a. g. 
Washington. 
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