Squab rearing requires great care; only with proper management can squabs be raised well

    Squab refers to the young pigeon from hatching until it leaves the nest for sale or before breeding. After a squab hatches, the parent pigeons will naturally care for their offspring with great attention, but in production, there are many problems that the parent pigeons cannot attend to, requiring the careful nursing of the manager so that the squabs can grow normally and the productivity of the breeding pigeons can be improved.

After a meat pigeon hatches, the squab weighs about 18 grams, its eyes are not yet open, its body is covered with down, and it lies slanting under the belly of the parent pigeon. After about 24 hours, it begins to feel hungry, so it will constantly stretch its head, touching the belly and crop of the parent pigeon. The parent pigeon knows what the squab wants, holds the squab's beak with its own beak, and then slowly spits food into the squab's mouth for the squab to suck. Once the squab is full, it lies under the parent pigeon's belly and sleeps comfortably.

After three or four days, the squab's eyes slowly open, its body gradually grows stronger, and feathers begin to grow on its body. At this point the squab begins to learn to walk, its food intake increases daily, and its digestion strengthens, so the parent pigeons feed the squab frequently, sometimes nearly 10 times a day. Therefore, the nutrition supplied to the parent pigeons should be higher, and the amount of beans can be increased. During the brooding period, the feed intake of the parent pigeons also increases greatly, eating about 1 times more than non-brooding pigeons.

Squabs eat a lot and defecate a lot, easily contaminating the nest, so more clean linen cloths should be prepared and replaced in time, because at this time the squab's disease resistance is very poor and it is most prone to illness.

When the squab is 1 week old, a leg band should be put on in time. The leg band is the pigeon's identity card. The leg band of a homing pigeon notes the place of origin and the date of birth, while the leg band of a meat pigeon is mostly replaced by a chicken wing number, which is printed with a number as a mark of the birth time and to distinguish sibling pigeons.

When the squab grows to about 10 days old, a lot of new feathers have already grown, and at this time the parent pigeons' brooding time will gradually shorten. The food fed by the parent pigeons also becomes semi-granular feed, and a few squabs cannot fully adapt to it, often developing indigestion and crop inflammation. When this happens, the squabs can be given some yeast tablets and other stomachic medicines to help digestion.

For a 15-day-old squab, its body weight is already close to that of the parent pigeon, and a meat squab can reach 400-500 grams. Its feathers have also basically grown in, and it moves freely, so it can be taken out of the egg nest. For the first few days, place a 20 cm × 20 cm linen cloth at the bottom of the cage, letting it slowly adapt on the linen cloth so that it will not sprain its leg joints. At this time the squab still needs to be fed by the parent pigeons, and the feed the parent pigeons give is also granular, the same as the feed they eat.