Poultry : a practical guide to the choice, breeding, rearing, and management of all descriptions of fowls, turkeys, guinea-fowls, ducks and geese for profit and exhibition / by Hugh Piper.

  • Piper, Hugh.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Poultry : a practical guide to the choice, breeding, rearing, and management of all descriptions of fowls, turkeys, guinea-fowls, ducks and geese for profit and exhibition / by Hugh Piper. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    distance, then alight, and trust to their rapid mode of running, and their dexterity in threading the mazes of brushwood and dense herbage, for security. They are shy, wary, and alert. It is not much kept, its habits being wandering, and requiring an extensive range, but as it picks up nearly all its food, and is very prolific, it may be made very profitable in certain localities. The whole management of both the young and the old may be precisely the same as that of turkeys, in hatching, feeding, and fattening. This “species,” says Mr. Dickson, “differs from all other poultry, in its being difficult to distinguish the cock from the hen, the chief difference being in the colour of the wattles, which are more of a red hue in the cock, and more tinged with blue in the hen. The cock has also a more stately strut.” They mate in pairs, and therefore an equal number of cocks and hens must be kept, or the eggs will prove unfertile. To obtain stock, some of their eggs must be procured, and placed under a common hen ; for if old birds are bought, they will wander away for miles in search of their old home, and never return. They should be fed regularly, and must always have one meal at night, or they will scarcely ever roost at home. They will not sleep in the fowl-house, but prefer roosting in the lower branches of a tree, or on a thick bush, and retire early. They make a peculiar, harsh, querulous noise, which is oft-repeated, and not agreeable. The hens are prolific layers, beginning in May, and continuing during the whole summer. Their eggs are small, but of excellent flavour, of a pale yellowish red, finely dotted with a darker tint, and remarkable for the hardness of the shell. The hen usually lays on a dry bank, in secret places ; and a hedgerow a quarter of a mile off is quite as likely to contain her nest as any situation nearer her home. She is very shy, and, if the eggs are taken from her nest, will desert it, and find another ; a few should, therefore, always be left, and it should never be visited when she is in sight. But she often contrives to elude all watching, and hatch