The Chicken Health Handbook

The editor of Rural Heritage has written a first-rate guide for the small producer interested in healthful meat and eggs as well as the exotic breed fancier raising birds for show. Having published a number of general guides to backyard poultry, including one for children, Damerow here concentrates on everything that can go wrong: diseases; problems associated with keeping birds in close quarters or caging them; litter; cannibalism; vitamin deficiency, resulting in poor molting; incubators that are too hot or too cold; predators; and the invasions of rats. She stresses that the best preventative measures involve protecting one's flock against outside influences (such as wild birds or other chickens), careful culling, and balanced nutrition. Damerow is a good writer, carefully walking the line between insulting the reader's intelligence, a flaw with many books of this sort, and giving more technical information than growers need. Her discussion of how one keeps straight which chick came from which mating--which involves the injection of food dyes into fertilized eggs, and carefully marking the webbings of feet--is downright ingenious. Flawless. John Mort