"The best time for breeding geese is at the end of winter and for laying and hatching from the beginning of February or March until the summer solstice. They breed usually in the water, diving to the bottom of the stream or pond.[187] A goose lays only three times a year: and each one should be furnished with a coop about two and a half feet square and bedded with straw: each of their eggs should be marked for identification, for they will not hatch any eggs but their own. They are usually set on nine or eleven eggs, never more than fifteen, nor less than five. In cold weather they set for thirty days, in warm weather twenty-five. When they are hatched the goslings are suffered to remain with their mother for five days, and then daily, when the weather is fine, they are driven out to the meadows or to the ponds or some swampy place. The gosling houses may be built either above or below ground, but never more than twenty should be housed together and care must be taken lest the floor be damp and that they are bedded on chaff or some thing of that kind, and that the house is so constructed as to keep out weasels and other beasts which prey on goslings. Geese are fed in wet places and it is the practice to sow especially for their food supply, using for this purpose any kind of grain, but particularly that salad plant called endive[188] which keeps green wherever there is water, freshening at the mere contact of water however dry it may be. This is gathered to be fed to them, for if they have access to the place where it is growing they will destroy the plant by trampling on it, or else kill themselves by eating too much of it, for they are greedy by nature. For this reason they must be watched, as often in feeding their greediness leads them to seize a root and to break their own necks in attempting to pull it from the ground: for the neck is weak, as the head is soft.
"If there is none of this plant they should be fed barley or some other grain. When the farrago season is on, feed that to them, but in the same manner as I have described in respect of endive. While they are setting they may be fed ground barley soaked in water. The goslings may be fed for the first two days on barley cake (pollenta) or raw barley, and for the next three days fresh water cress chopped fine in a dish. When they are of an age to be kept by themselves in flocks of twenty, in the kind of house I have described, they are fed on barley meal or farrago or some kind of young herbage cut up.
"For cramming, goslings are picked out when they are about six months old, and are shut up in the fattening pen and there are fed three times a day as much as they will eat, of crushed barley and flour dust mixed with water, and after meals they should be made to drink copiously. Kept on this diet they will be fat in about two months.[189] After every meal the feeding place must be cleaned, for, while geese like a clean place, they never leave any place clean in which they have been."
Of ducks
XI. "Whoever wishes to keep a flock of ducks and to establish a [Greek: naessotropheion], should choose for it, above all others if it is possible, a swampy location because that is most agreeable to the ducks, but, if not, then a situation sloping to a natural lake or pool, or to an artificial pond, with steps leading down to it, practicable for the ducks. The enclosure where they are kept should have a wall fifteen feet high, such as you saw at Seius' villa, with only one door opening into it. All around the wall on the inside should run a broad platform on which are built against the wall the duck houses, fronting on a level concrete vestibule in which is constructed a permanent channel in which their food can be placed in water, for ducks are fed in that way. The entire wall should be given a smooth coating of stucco to keep out polecats[190] and other animals of prey, and the enclosure should be covered with a net of large mesh to prevent eagles from pouncing in and the ducks themselves from flying out.[191]
"For food they are given wheat, barley, grape marc, and some times even lobsters and other such aquatic animals. The pond in the enclosure should be fed with a large head of water so that it may be kept always fresh.
"There are other kinds of similar birds, like teals and coots which may be fed in the same way.
"Some even keep partridges, which, as Archelaus writes, conceive when they hear the voice of the male bird. By reason of the natural abundance and the delicacy of their flesh, these last are not crammed like those domestic fowls I have described, but they are fattened by feeding in the ordinary way.
"And now, as I think that I have completed the first act of the drama of the barn yard, I am done."
Of rabbits