356 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. [1 May, 1899. 
eggs or to die. Not so the so-called poultry tick, which lives in the cracks and 
holes, and, even under the bark of trees where fowls roost, bug-like, and only 
ventures out at night to feed, and returns at daylight to its ambush. I am 
told that any light or noise will drive them to their holes, and the most careful 
search will fail to discover them. About every ten or twelve years a new 
plague appears, conditions, apparently, mature quite suddenly, and so we 
awake to find we have a new enemy to battle against. Nature is inscrutable 
in her workings; for years she is slowly sowing the soil, each season only 
advancing but a little way, till some great change comes, such asa long drought 
or a big flood to rush her work to its climax and mature the harvest she has 
been years preparing for. It is very hard to believe that all things are working 
together for our good, as we are told they are. One naturally wonders to 
what end were the ticks sent, save to ruin the squatter, the milkman, and now 
the poultry keeper. - 
I see by a late paper that two or three writers are advising a dip for fowls 
infested with ticks. Whoever they are, they know very little about fowls to 
advise anything of the kind. Interfere with the feathers and you seriously 
effect the health of the bird. As well kill them outright as dip fowls in any 
compound that soils or clogs the feathers. A Victorian poultry keeper, writing 
to the Australasian, gives the following as his experiences with the tick, proving 
pretty conclusively that the pest must have been known down there for some 
time. He says:—‘TI have heard and read much concerning trees as roosts for 
fowls, and that ticks will not live in green trees. My experience is that they 
will live and increase to a great extent on green, growing trees, as well as any 
other place. At the present time there are trees that serve as roosts for our 
fowls, and they are covered with ticks under every piece of bark that is the 
least bit loose, and some of these pests are almost 4-inch in length. We never 
find large ones on the birds, but sometimes the patches of eggs and young 
ticks are on nearly the whole surface of the fowl’s body. Our unfailin 
remedy for these is kerosine, and for chickens a little salad or other thin oi] 
mixed with kerosine, as the kerosine alone will scald and bring off the skin, 
The ticks will, I am told, creep into horses and deposit their eggs. I have 
known them almost cover some young puppies in less than three hours (with 
eges) in the daytime too.” If the above be a sure statement of affairs in 
Victoria, they are indeed shutting the stable door after the horse has been 
stolen. But again, I am inclined to think that the writer whose words I quote 
has mistaken the common grass tick for the so-called poultry tick when he 
alludes to it as being found on trees and under the bark. Also the poultry bug 
(or tick) would not lay its eggs on horses or puppies, the usual places eine 
amongst the droppings and dust in the poultry house and in the cracks and 
erevices of the walls and roosts. I have seena Leghorn rooster’s comb one 
mass of grass ticks, in a very dry season, when the latter were plentiful, and I 
have seen an Choseumy ears covered with them so that you could not put a pin 
between, and though frightfully weak from the combined effects of drought 
and loss of blood, the little animal was apparently quite immune to tick poison, 
as was also the Leghorn rooster; butin both instances, the ticks were the eTass, 
or as they are usually called, the scrub ticks, which lay their eggs under the 
loose bark in deadwood, and everywhere in the scrub in fact.—Awstralian 
Tropiculturist. 
THE FANCIER 
Is often laughed at, and more often inveighed against, as being a faddist pure 
and simple, and of no earthly use from a practical point of view to the poultry 
man. In fact, it is very generally averred that he is the man above all others 
who is fast ruining, if he has not already done so, the good properties of our ; 
different breeds of fowls, both for their laying and table qualities. 
While granting that in many instances the strictures are in some sort 
deserved, J must still raise my voice, as one who has some knowledge of the — 
