POULTRY KEEPING.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 77, 31 March 1928, Page 20

POULTRY KEEPING.

(By R. J. TERRY.)

TO CORRESPONDENTS. GREEN FOOD.—In your district you could plant kale at any time, Jersey or Thousand-headed would be quite suitable. Plant the seed in a box, and set out the plants when large enough to handle. Next summer you should get a tremendous amount of green stuff if you pick off the large leaves and give to the birds When the plants are well established you ran not very well give too much manure. Artichokes would have far more feeding value for laying lions than would mangolds, but you will not get many eggs if you depend on roots as a food for the birds. A fowl, to lay heavily, must have concentrated foods ; roots are all right in assisting to keep tlie blood in health in the absence of sufficient green stuff. ANALYSIS. — I cannot perform free analysis. The sample sent does not require to be analysed to tell one it is unsuitable to feed laying hens. Your nose will tell you that. When will poultry keepers recognise the fact that a liigh-class article creates a demand: therefore, if the egg is fresh and free from taint the consumption will be greater. The greater the demand the higher the price. Why buy something nasty because it is apparency cheap? It is not real economy in feeding your birds. Salt in minute quantities will" not harm the birds. You can give a litWe mustard if you wish, but there is nothing gained by it. especially in such a climate as thait of North Auckland. Yes, vinegar is sometimes put in the mash when birds are laying soft-shelled eggs, the idea being that the vinegar will more readily dissolve the grit consumed by the bird. Personally I think it is wisest to check the laying by decreasing the rations for a while if a number of birds persist in laying soft-shelled eggs, although they are well supplied with grit. PESTS. —The insects troubling your birds are not lice, but mites, often known as red mites. They are on the birds only in the dark, hiding in crevices during the day. The putting of tobacco leaves in the nest would not be sufficient to drive the mites away. On one occasion, in quite a small building in which there were some old nests, 1 burned six pounds of sulphur with the vindow and doorsclosed, and yet did not destroy the mites. If you are using fumes they would need to be highly poisonous, such as cyanide. If the mites can be got at, £pray them with kerosene, or part kerosene and kilmite, or with an old brush dipped in the solution brush over their resorts, but 1 would warn you that unless the solution comes in absolute contact with them you will not eradicate them; they will simply go further back into their crevices. If you shut up the houwe with the view of starving them out, as you suggest, it would certainly have to be closed for over a year, possibly two years, to be certain, as they can live for many months without food, or apparently without food. GUINEA FOWL— Guinea Fowls are quite easily reared if they are allowed to make their own nests and rear their young. It is not advisable to keep them with other poultry as they are sometimes very pugnacious. I do not think the Guinea Fowls would be stolen, as they are more alert than Turkeys, which often perch low or on fences, enabling the thief to capture them at night. It would be a different matter with Guinea Fowls; in fact they give warning at the approach of strangers.

GENERAL ADVICE FOR SUCCESS.

A correspondent asks for some general advice which will help him to reach the top rungs of the ladder. He is taking up poultry farming. Well, 1 will again repeat the advice to go slow. Get tsome experience before you expend a large amount of capital. The mating of your breeding pen or pens is a problem wliich demands the exercise of more thought and skill than any other task confronting the new beginner. The future success of the flock depends wholly upon it, and yet we see this task approached more or less perfunctorily. If mistakes are made in selecting the birds, those mistakes are indubitably reproduced, and later multiplied a hundredfold in the progeny. Oil the other hand a beginner may pick up years of work and thought of some older breeder by purchasing his stock.

But even before the selection of the breeding pen one of the first details to be considered is the arrangement of the site for the pen or pens. It is essential that the breeding stock should have ample accommodation, and should be able to range over suitable ground. This need not necessarily be large. The finest possible ground for fowls in a breeding pen is soil of a light, loamy nature, or even inclined to sandy. In such soil the birds can work, keeping their skins clean by dust bathing and keeping in check insect pests. Further, pools of stagnant water will not find a place on such light soil. If possible there should be some natural shelter, which low trees or bushes provide, from the hot sun in summer and cold winds in winter. Bushes or break-winds need not be high. We often make the mistake of standing oil a piece of ground to test the volume of wind, whereas if we were only the height of a bird from the ground we might find it comparatively sheltered, so judge the shelter from the bird's point of view, and not by your own. The breeding pens must be in a convenient position, close to a path if possible, so that the ground may not be turned up in wet weather by the fowls passing to and fro. This is as much for the benefit of yourself as for the fowls, for it is a risky business slipping about on moist earth with a bucket of food in one hand and a basket of eggs in the other.

Remember you must look forward, not to the present only. Wherever the poultry house may be placed the ground about it, if grass land, is sure to be worn bare, so if your ground is on the heavy side, and the poultry excreta will not be readily absorbed by it, it might be as well to make a shell path or gravel path all around that portion of the house on which it is necessary for you to walk or where the birds congregate. If the gravel is coarse, or the shell fairly large, heavy rains will wash the surface comparatively clean. Whether .the runs are large or small, it is a good plan to serve the grain ration as far away from the fowlliouse as possible, thus encouraging the birds to range and the manure to be deposited evenly over the ground, instead of on one spot, and becoming quickly tainted. Unless the grass remains in the pens, naturally you will not feed the grain outside during continued wet weather.

The house should be sufficiently large to allow the birds to scratch for grain in dry' litter on the floor, which litter should be never less than four inches in depth. If the birds only just scratch the litter with their toes there is very little real exercise, but if the litter is deep enough to come over the feet of the birds then they have a fair weight to shift while scratching for grain. If you really wish to get to the top of the tree, and keep there, as regards egg production, then you will have to do a certain amount of trap nesting. As before stated, you may, if you choose your stock right, commence where another man is leaving off. Still, it has to be remembered that the tendency is to revert to the natural hen, unless bv feeding and selection you keep her abnormal, which the modern laying hen is. There is only one way to tell definitely how many eggs a hen is capable of laying, and that is by trapping her during the twelve months of her pullet period. I will admit a pullet's winter egg produce tion is a very good criterion as to her

capability, but, of course, the whole year's performance, properly checked, is the only perfectly reliable guide. To trust entirely to handling or by sight, re conformation, etc., is to take chances so far as egg production is concerned, hence it will always be found that the breeders who have really made lasting names for themselves have trap-nested at least for some period. Trap-nesting may seem to be a tedious road to the building up of a successful breeding pen, but I am fully convinced that the advantages of trap-nesting greatly outweigh the trouble. It makes for reliability in, and intimate knowledge of, one's stock, and to know definitely the capabilities of each bird simplifies the final selection tremendously.