DETERMINATION OF SEX

Taranaki Daily News, 11 September 1934, Page 27 (Supplement)

DETERMINATION OF SEX

A MECHANICAL DEVICE CHOOSING EGGS FOR SETTINGS. TARANAKI BREEDER’S EXPERIENCE “Yes, I have had persons who knew how to select eggs that contained a pullet,” said Mr. Walter Scott, the wellknown poultry breeder, Brooklands Road, New Plymouth; “either their mother or their great-grandmother or some other old identity had shown them years ago! All you have to do is to pick out the long, small eggs for the pullet—of course, the nice round ones for the opposite sex—and the trick is done. But is it? On one occasion a lady said she would buy a sitting if I would let her choose the eggs for pullets. She got the chance and promised to let me know results later. She did—seven cockerels and five pullets—funny, is it not? “Now as an old poultry man myself I have never had much faith in any principle or system of defining sex in anything before birth. Of course I am probably out of date in regard to Nature’s secrets. Some time ago a salesman called on me; he had got the real thing, an instrument that would find correctly sex in anything and could not go wrong. The make-up of the instrument was a piece of thin wire with a ring attached to one end and a small metal weight at the other. When held on the finger the weight would swing one way for female and the other way for male. The salesman, being mechani-cal-minded, said it could not make a mistake. It would save me or any other poultry breeder money and time, especially the time spent in pulling young cockerels’ necks. It was, he assured me, a real money and time saver, and the device could be had for the small sum of 2s 6d. “He told the tale so well that I was tempted to do a bit of speculating. ‘Now,’ said the salesman, ‘if at present you desire a sitting of hatching eggs all pullets I will show what this instrument can do.’ Well, I said, here is a basket of nice eggs. Pick out 13 eggs for a hen I intend sitting. I want all pullets. The salesman got to work picking out future pullets. In fact in a short space of time 13 beautiful eggs were placed on the* table. He was sure that in 21 days out of those eggs would come 13 pullets. The instrument said -o. But I . leave you to imagine how the salesman looked whe; I told him that the eggs with the pullets in had come from a pen of hens that had never seen a rooster!

Ney Zealand is steadily building up a honey export trade, and Taranaki supplies a fair amount of the honey that is graded for export. One side-line of beekeeping is that of breeding Italian queen bees and bees for sale. Here, too, Taranaki holds a favourable position in the quality of bees bred for selling to other districts. The first oversea steamer to make New Plymouth a port of call was the German steamer Walkure in 1914. It was three years later when the S.S. Waiwera arrived that the real era of the port as a deep sea harbour began. Sixty years ago there were settlers in Taranaki willing to try experiments in pastures. The Daily News of August, 1884, records the successful use of “prairie” grass on a North Taranaki farm. I