How to Feed.
When I can get stale baker's bread I use that in connection with, and instead of, bran. It can be profitably mixed with milk, not too sour, when it can be had for a cent a quart. But do not give milk as drink,—the young birds will smear themselves all over with it, their beaks and eyes will be stuck up, the down will come off their little bodies in large patches, and they will be a constant aggravation. I was once called upon to visit an establishment, the owner of which complained that his ducklings did not grow, and he was very anxious for me to locate the trouble. I found six to eight hundred ducklings there of all ages, and, strange to say, nearly of one size; and one lot of nearly three hundred ducklings eight weeks old would not average one pound each, when they should have weighed four pounds.
Such a sight I never saw before, and hope never to see again. Of all the miserable, squalid, contemptible looking objects, those ducklings took the lead. This man had not only mixed their food with milk, but had kept it by them in open troughs, and the birds had bathed in it and spattered it over each other until there was hardly a feather left on their emaciated bodies; and yet this man did not know what ailed his ducks.
Is it strange that some people fail in the poultry business?
When in full operation, we run twenty-one large machines, and as it requires twenty-seven days to close up each hatch, of course we have a hatch come off nearly every day. Now as each hatch is supposed to occupy two brooder-pens with the corresponding yards, in the course of five or six weeks that brooding-house will be filled with its complement of 3,000 ducklings. These will be of all ages, from the little puff-balls just from the machine, to the half-grown bird of six weeks old. The brooding pipes are supposed to radiate the same amount of heat at the extreme end of the building as they do next the heater, consequently the brooders are of the same temperature in all their parts. Not so the building.
As the heater radiates a great deal of heat, the end in which this is located is always 12 or 15 degrees warmer than the other and is thus better adapted to the comfort of the newly hatched ducklings than the other, so I always put the birds fresh from the machine next the heater, while the older ones are passed down the building. This is a very simple process. One end of the partition board is lifted up a little, food scattered in a trough in the empty pen adjoining, the ducklings will rush under in a moment, then the board is dropped. The same process is continued until all are moved and the building filled.
