The national standard squab book : a practical manual giving complete and precise directions for the installation and management of a successful squab plant

Front matter

ELMEII C.MICE,

Class 4^X_:i6x_ Copyright N" 1

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

Chapter I. Squabs Pay

Experience of a Customer who Started in January, 1902, Erected a Plant Worth $3,000 and Made Money Almost from the Start— Settlements of Squab Breeders in Iowa, California, NeAv Jersey and Pennsylvania — Large Incomes Made from Pigeons — Squab Plants Known to be Making Money — The Hard Working Farmer and the Easy Working Squab Kaiser — No Occupation for a Drone — No Exaggeration.

"Will it pay me to raise squabs?" is the first question which the beginner asks. We take the case of a man who bought a Manual in January, 1902. His boys had kept a few pigeons but had never handled them in a commercial way, nor tried to make any money with them. The reading of the book gave him the first real light on the squa'b industry. Possibly he was more ready to believe because he knew from his own personal experience that a squa'b grows to market size in four weeks and is then readily marketable. Anyway, he started at once to build a sqiiab house according to the directions given. The ground was too hard for him to get a pickaxe into, so he laid the foundation timbers on bricks, rushed the work ahead with the help of good carpenters aud sent on his order for breeding stock. In the course of a few weeks he ordered a second lot of breeders, followed by a third and a fourth, and he kept adding new buildings. When spring came and the ground softened, he jacked up his first squab house, took out the bricks at the four corners and put in cedar posts. By the middle of July he had five handsome squab houses ami flying pens, all built by skilled labor in the best possible style at a cost of at least $300 apiece. With his buildings and their fittings and his birds, his plant now (August, 1902) stands for an expenditure of between $2,000 and $3,000. His next move, this fall, will be to buy a farm where he can have more room, and which will be auxiliai'y to his present plant.

This gentleman lives in a locality where he had to put up nice-looking buildings, or the neighbors would have complained. He spent probably three times more money on his Ijuildings than the average beginner would spend. He is a superintendent of a large manufacturing plant, a man of push and energy, and he has four young boys in his family who have helped with the wife and grandfather to make the venture successful. It has been a paying venture almost from the very start. Everything that we wrote about squabs as money makers came true in his case. One of lo National Standard Squab Book.

*,he sous, a lad of nineteen, came on to see us in August and told us the story of their success. He was after more breediug stock. He said he had many calls from people who wished to buy stock of him, and he was unable to supply all of them, but he did not intend to have money offered him very long without being able to pass out the birds. In other words, tiiey were going into squabs for all they were worth. They had not doue any advertising, and had not sold live breeders to any extent, but figured their profits solely on the sale of squabs to commission houses, and they were getting for them just what we said the commission men would pay.

Now if a well-to-do superintendent, filled with no desperate idea of making squabs pay, can start with no experience, thi-ow out money freely like that and depend on his boys mostly to push the venture ahead, all the while attending to a very large business, then we s^y that you caa do it too, no matter who you are or w^here you live.

We have a great many visitors, some coming from remote points of the United States. One of our visitors in the summer of 1902 was Mr. A. L. Furlong, from a little towa in Iowa. Mr. Furlong said to us: "Iowa is quite a squab-'breeding state. There are plants in Ruthven, Osage, Wallake and Estherville. The owner of a plant in Ruthven I know very well. He showed me his account books; he was shipping from $700 to $800 worth of squabs last mouth. He is making a profit of $3,000 to $5,000 a year. He ships to the Chicago market, as do nearly all the Iowa breeders. He never gets less than $2.50 a dozen for his squa^bs. I am going to start raising squabs myself."

Mr. Furlong left an order for one of our Manuals, having given his first one to his friend. He said that his friend was breeding common pigeons and would like to know our methods. We discarded common pigeons some time ago. If our Iowa friends will use Homer pigeons instead of common ones, they will produce a much better squab and make more money.

We had a curious confirmatioQ of the above in August, 1902, when Mr. E. H. Grice, who lives in the northern part of Vermont, visited us. Mr. Grice had just returned from a A'isit to the West, and stopped for a while at Ruthven, Iowa, where he saw the plant above noted. The proprietor referred Mr. Grice to us and advised him to start with Homer pigeons, saying 'that if he were to stock up again, it would be with Homer instead of the common pigeons. Before leaving, Mr. Grice gave us an order for 100 pairs of our Homers.

The number of orders for breeding stock which we have received from Iowa is out of proportion to any state near it, showing that these squab plants are known throughout Iowa to be making money. The same is true of California, also Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In the country around MiLlville, Mauricetown and Dividing Creek, all in the southern part of New Jersey are hundreds of squab plants. The reason is that it has spread from mouth to mouth there that there is big money in raising these dainties. There are more squab breeders in eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey than there are chicken breeders. We went through

National Standard Squab Book.

II that territory iu June, 1902, noting the buildiugs and metliods of the squab raisers there and finding out from them if they were satisfied with the financial returns. All were enthusiastic and said it was easy work, that siiuabs beat hens easily and were much less care. The methods of some of these breeders were extremely ci-ude, the birds nesting in old boxes of all sizes nailed to the walls of the .squab houses, and apparently never being cleaned. With no reflection on the squab raisers of Jersey, but in order to demonstrate our point that the work is easy, we want to say that the typical breeder in that country as we saw him was seated a good part of the time on an old soap box, in or near his squab house, smoking a pipe and taking life easy, with plenty of time to talk or read. Somebody has said that a squab plant of 1,000 pairs of birds will pay better than a farm. The contrast between the hard, grinding toil of the man who works a large farm and the "standing around" of the owner of a squab plant is indeed a striking one. However, we do not speak of this to give you the idea that money is going to flow into your lap just because you buy some squab breeders of us. It is no work for a drone or a "getrich-quick" person whose enthusiasm runs riot for two weeks and then cools off. Our class of trade is men and women of experience and reliable common sense who have a knowledge of the world and understand that things come by work and not for the asking. The people who are able and wiilling to pay us from $50 to $500 for a breeding outfit, as hundreds do, are not caught by glittering promises, but have money laid by through exercise of the qualities of ability and shrewdness. The naturally careless, improvident person, who is generally in debt, should not start squab raising. It is a sensible indu.stry for sensible people.

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Chapter II. An Easy Start

No Special Form of Buikliug Necessary— Points to Remember— Shelter Adapted to the Climate — How to Use a Building Which You Now Have — Squab House aud Flyiug Pen — Lining the Squab House with Nests— Use of Egg Crates— How to I'ut Up the Perches— Difference Between the Nest Box, Nest Pan and Nest— How to Tell How Many Pigeons Can Occupy a Certain Building — A Large Flock of Pigeons is as Easily Cared for as a Small Flock — How to Use Your Time to Best Advantage.

Do not get the idea that any special form of building is necessary to raise squabs. We will tell you how to put up a structure t'hat will make your work easier for you, and enable you to handle a big flock fast and accurately, but pigeons will work in almost any place, if it is free from rats, darkness and the musty dampness which goes with darkness. Any building, whether a woodshed, a com crib, a barn, an outhouse of any description, or even a hog pen, can be made a successful home for pigeons with a little work.

The points to remember ai'e these, first, that the building be on fairly level, sunny ground: second, that it be raised from the ground so that rats cannot ibreed under it out of sight and reach; third, that it ought to be fairly tight, so as to keep out rain and excessive cold. Pigeons ought to have sunlight aud fresh air, 'ike any other animal, and need protection from the elements.

In practice, therefore, most squab houses are found raised on posts a foot or two feet off the ground; they face the sout'h (here in New England) because most of our bitter weather conies from the north and east. If you live in a state, territory or foreign country where conditions are different, adapt your squab houses to th'.)se conditions. In some localities, the fierce weather comes from the South and West, in which case your squab house should J'ace the North or East.

Here in New England we build a tight house to withstand 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 tiirht 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 hen house built tight and close, vermin would swarm and harass the chicks, and they would harass the squabs just as fast.

Cheap But Practical Nest Boxes.

These are empty egg crates piled one atop another from floor to roof of Squab House. Each egg crate is two feet long, one foot wide and one foot deep. The partition in the middle makes two nest boxes, each one foot square. Into each of these nest boxes a wood nappy is placed. The birds build their nests in these wood nappies.

Some of our customers write from places like Oregon aud Idaho, where there is a wet aud 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 or better 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 squa'bs. 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 squaib 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 fhe 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, w'hea it is closed, will not figure out for themseles 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 glass.

The flying pen which you will build on the window side of tue 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 sunlight. They enjoy the sun very much and it does them good and they court its direct rays all the time. Build the flying pen, if you choose, up over the roof, so the 'birds may sua themselves there. If that side of the roof which faces the flying pen is too steep for the pigeons to get a foothold, nail footholds along the roof, same as carpenters use when they ai-e shingling a roof, and the pigeons will rest on these to sun themselves. For the flying pen you want the ordinary poultry netting, either of one-inch or two-inch mesh. The two-inch mesh is almost invariably used by squab raisers, because it is very much cheaper than ttie one-inch mesh. The one-inch mesh is used only by squab raisers who are afraid that small birds (the English sparrows here in New England) will steal through the large meshes of the two-inch netting and eat the grain which you 'have "bought for the pigeons. You can buy this wire netting in rolls of any width from one foot up to six feet. If your flying pen is 12 feet high, you should use rolls of the six-foot wire. If it is ten feet high, rolls which are five feet wide are what you want. If your flying pen is to be eight feet hig'h, buy rolls which are four feet wide. In joining one width of wire netting to its neighbor, in constructing your flying pen, do not cut small pieces of tie wire and tie them together, for that takes too much time and is a bungling job, but buy a coil of No. 18 or 20 irou wire and weave this from oue selvage to aaother of your wire nettiug, in and out of the meshes, and you have the best joint you can get, and a ship-shape job.

You can line the three walls of the interior of your squab house with nests if you choose. The fourth wall is the oue in which the window or windows are. On this fourth wall you should not have nest boxes, but perches. These perches, or roosts, should be tacked up about 15 inches apart, so as to give the birds room without interfering with each other. The advantage of the V-sliaped roost which we advise is that a bird perched on it cannot soil the bird underneath. Do not buy the pateut pigeon roosts whidh you see advertised, for a pigeon roosting on one will soil the pigeon roosting on the one immediately below.

Please note particularly at this point the following terms which we use, and do not become confused, The nest box is something in which rests the nappy or other Best pan in which the nest is built. Do not say or think of nests when you mean nest boxes.

The nest boxes, when done, should look like the pigeon holes of a desk, and should be about one foot high, one foot wide and one foot deep. A •''ariation either way of an inch or two will not matter.

One way to get those pigeon holes is to build them of nice pine lumber, in the form of boxing one-half or five-eighths of an inch thick. Another way is to use hemlock or spruce boards one inch thick. The third way (which we think is the best for the beginner who wishes to start cheapest and quickest) is to use egg crates, or orange boxes. These egg crates are two feet long, one foot wide and oue foot deep, but they are divided ia the middle by a partition, giving two spaces, each of a cubic foot, and this is just what the squab raiser wants. They are procurable almost anywhere in the United States and Canada brand new for ten or fifteen cents each, and if you buy them after the egg shippers are through with them, you can get them for three to five cents apiece. Some grocers will be glad to have you carry them away and will charge you nothing for them. The crates are built of thin, tough wood and usually are neat aad solid. Take off the covers and throw the covers away, you do not need them. Then put one egg crate on its side, open top out, and place another egg crate on top of that, and so on until you have covered the three walls of your squab house from the floor to the roof. Do not use aay nails, they are not necessary, the crates will keep in position by their weight. It is an advantage, also, to have them loose, for when you clean the nests, you can step up on ji chair or box, take down the crates, commencing with the top. and clean each oue with your feet on the floor. If you build a substantial set of nest boxes of boxing or hemlock lumber, you will have to stand on a chair arid strain your arms in order to clean the top nest boxes, so jou see their are points in the low-priced arrangement not possessed by the faacy kind. It is on the same principle by which a humble small boy with bent pin and worms and an old pole catches more fish than the city angler with a $2Fi assortment of hooks, lines and artificial flies.

It is the pigoons auil the iutelligeuoe behind them which do the trick, every time. A fancy pigeon house with fancy trimmings cannot produce any better squabs than the home-made affair, provided the birds are the same in both cases.

You should have a pair of nest boxes for a pair of pigeons. By a pair of pigeons we mean two pigeons, a male and a female. By a pair of nest boxes we mean two nest boxes. We find that the word pair has a different meaning to people in different parts of Vhe country, perhaps on the same principle that a pair of scissors or a pair of suspenders is one object, while a pair of something else, as in this case, means two objects. A pair of pigeons attend to a pair of squabs in one nest box, nevertheless for each pair of pigeons you need two nest boxes, for when the squabs are about two weeks old in one nest, the old birds will go to the adjoining nest box, or to a nest box in a distant part of the squab house, and begin housekeeping again, laying eggs and dividing their attention between the two families.

Count your nest boxes and you will know how many pigeons your house will accommodate. If your count shows 96 nest boxes (in other words, 48 pairs of nest boxes), you can accommodate 48 pairs of pigeons. Do not write us and tell us that you have a house of a certain size and ask us to tell you how many pairs of pigeons it will accommodate. Put in your nest boxes as we have described and then count them, and you will know. Or you may figure it out for yourself on paper, allowing two nest boxes, each one cubic foot in size, for each pair of birds. To put it in another way, you should allow one cubic foot of nest box space for each breeding pigeon. Surely we have made this so plain now that you cannot go astray.

Now suppose you work backwards, saying to yourself that you wish to order 96 pairs of 'breeders, and want to know how large a house you will need to accommodate them. From what we have written in the foregoing paragraph, you know that for each pair of pigeons you will need two nest boxes each one cubic foot in size. Therefore for 96 pairs of pigeons you will need 192 nest boxes, or 96 egg crates, or their equivalent in space.

Perhaps your start will 'be made with so sniaU a number of birds that you will not have to cover more than one wall of your squab house with nest boxes. Cover one wall, or two walls, or three walls, whichever the occasion demands. Have a lot of spare boxes, if you wish, and let the breeding pairs choose where they will. An extra number of nest boxes may be useful to you to accommodate the young birds raised to breeding age fi'om the old birds which you buy of us, if you intend to raise your squabs to breeding age.

An expenditure of not over five dollars, and a couple of days' time, will transform the average old building into a habitation for squabs. Put on the finishing touches and add to the expense to suit your fancy. You ninv cover the outside of the building with tarred paper and shingle or clapboard it. You may put a skylight iu the roof to let ia more sun. Improve it all you wish. Use your own judgment.

To get at your pigeons in such a house, you walk in through the door and find yourself directly among them, the nest boxes all pointing at you. Go to the nest which you wish to iuvcstigate or from which you wish to take out the squabs and put your hand iu the opening. The old birds will fiy by your head, perhaps, and may strike you with their wings, but they Will not fly in your face and eyes, they are good dodgers. Don't be afraid that if you enter the house when the housekeeping is going on you will frighten the birds so they never will come back to the eggs or the squabs. They will seem timid at first, but they will get accustomed to you. In the course of a few weeks, only a few will make a great hustle to get away from you. Many of them will continue to sit contentedly on the eggs and if you put up your hand to them they will not fly off in fear but will slap you with their wings, telling you in their language not to bother them. Carry some hempseed in with you and you will teach the birds to come and eat it out of your hand. You can tame them and teach them to love you as any animal is taught. The pigeon, particularly the Homer, the king of them all, is a knowing bird.

Tack up perches where you have room on that wall or those walls of the squab house which have no nest boxes. You do not need a perch for every pigeon, because while some are'on perches, others are iu the nests, or out in the flying pen, or on the roof, or on the floor of the squab house. If you have 48 pigeons, 20 perches will be enough, and you can get along with a dozen. Make each perch of two pieces of board, one six inches square, the other six inches by five, and toe-nail the perch to the wall of the squab house as shown in the illustration. Y'ou cannot have one long pole for a pigeon perch. If you had such a pole, and your pigeons were perched on it, or some of them were, a bully cock would saunter down the line and push off all the others.

In the centre of the squab house you place an empty crate or overturned box. The object of this is to break the force of the wand made by the pigeons' wings as they fly in and out of the squab house. Otherwise the floor of the squab house would be swept clean by the force of the wind. It also forms a roosting place for the birds, and finally, it is a convenient resting place for tlie straw, hay and grass out of which the pigeons build their nests.

The floor of the squab house should be kept clean. We used to advise that a layer of sawdust one inch thick be kept on the floor of the squab house, to absorib the droppings, but we have found a steady and profitable demand for pigeon manure, and this manure is worth scraping up and carefully saving, for its sale will pay from one-quarter to one-third of the grain bill. Use a hoe to scrape the droppings from the floor, and pack (he manure away in barrels. Clean the floor about once in three weeks, or oftener, depending on the size of your flock. Pigeon manure is in active demand all the time by tanneries. We send the manure from our pigeons

Nest Boxes Built of Lumber.

This shows the front of the nest boxes as they face the interior of the squab house. They are from ten to twelve inches square, and the same distance deep. A slight variation does not matter. The fronts of the nest boxes are perfectly plain, as shown. It is not necessary to nail up pieces of board to keep the nappies and squabs from falling out. They will not fall out. The backs of the nest boxes may be on hinges, and be approached from a passageway, as shown in the picture on page 20. Or the backs may be solid, in which case you will get at the nests by going into the interior of the squab house.

by freight to tanneries in Lowell, Lynn, Peabody and Dauvers, and are paid foi' it at the rate of sixty cents a bushel.

A peculiarity about pigeon manure is that it is not foul-smelling like hen manure, and when it is mixed with water you get a kind of crude soap. In washing the nappies, no soap in ueeessary. Use warm water in washing (them and the manure caked to them forms a cleansing soap in conjunction with the water. If you have a basket in which you have transported pigeons, and whose bottom is caked with the Jiard droppings, lay the basket face down and sprinkle water liberally on the underside and the manure will drop off in large pieces from the inside and the basket will become perfectly clean.

In raising live stock of 'any kind, arrange matters so the animals w'ill look after themselves as much as possible. We all know that automatic machinery has cheapened many articles formerly dear, and the perfect breeding outfit is automatic, needing only a supply of feed and water. Aim to cut down the factor of personal drudgery, so as to leave your time eiear to observe and plan, and execute intelligently. Beginners who load themselves down with a daily round of exacting duties soon lose heart, their patience gives out and they become disgusted. We have known breeders of rabbits to fail simply because they raised them in hutches. »Each hutch had a door and two dishes, one for feed, the other for water. Every day, the door of the hutch had to be opened, the hutch cleaned, the dishes refilled (and often cleaaed), and the door closed. It took 15 or 20 motions to do this for each hutch. Multiply this by 20 to 30 (.the number of the hutches), and the burden grew unbearable. It was not surprising that in three or four mouths the breeder's patience was worn out. The factor of personal drudgery had become greater thau the rabbits. The thoughtful breeder would have turned his rabbits into two or three enclosures on the ground and let them shift for themselves. Then one set of motions in feeding would have answered for all, and there would have been no dirt to clean up. Infinite patience as well as skill is required to make a success of animals given individual attention. The aim of every breeder should be to make one minute of his time serve the greatest possible numljer of animals. When you think and reason for yourself, you understand how much more practical it is to give sixty animals one minute of your lime than one animal one minute. Time is money and if you are too particular, and too fussy, and thoughtless about these details, it is a clear case of the chances being sixty to one agaiust you.

At the start, the problem of breeding squabs for market is in your favor, because one hundred pairs of breeding pigeons may be handled as easily and as rapidly as one pair. Try to keep this numerical advantage in your favor all the time. Discard every plan that cuts down the efficiency of your own labor, and adopt every device that will give you control in the same time over a greater number of pigeons.