EGYPT’S REBELLIOUS HENS.

Shannon News, 29 September 1925, Page 3

EGYPT’S REBELLIOUS HENS.

Egyptian hens have left the habit of sitting on their eggs, and no longer know how to carry out their maternal duties. For thousands of years, since the days of Tutankhamen, chicks have been hatched by artificial if primitive means, and the centuries have wrought no perceptible change in the method of procedure (writes Tuuly Drummond Hay, in the ‘Daily Express’). A model Egyptian incubator, sent to the International Poultry Congress at Barcelona, and subsequently accepted by the Edinburgh University Museum, is on the same principle exactly as those used in the age of the Pharaohs. Thermometers did not exist then and they do not exist to-day for the peasant, who tests the temperature of the incubator by the crude method of feeling the eggs with his eyelid. The fuel is served twice a day, and the operator refers to this work as giving the eggs their “breakfast and dinner.” b On the eleventh day. when the fire is altogether extinguished, the eggs are said to'have “fasted.” There is a typical Egyptian incubator at Bush. Standing in the middle of the village, surrounded by houses, it is to all outward appearances an ordinary , peasant’s . house. Built of sun-dried mud bricks, it measures about 16 yds long and IS yds wide, and contains six ovens, in \\hich an average of 75,000 eggs are Boated during a season, with a mean result of not less than 50 and not more than 80 per cent, successful hatchings. These incubators generally belong to individuals, who buy eggs at £2 a thousand, and soil the chicks for a little more than double the price. Expert operators jealously guard the ageless hereditary secrets of their profession. -A curious characteristic of the native fowl is that for several weeks after hatching It remains devoid of feathers at all. European pure strains degeneiato immediately in' Egypt, but crossed with the fayoumi (bantam), the result is an unattractive .sturdy,