Key Technical Points for Breeding Management of Meat Pigeons During the Brooding Period

Since newly hatched squabs are weak, have poor thermoregulation, weak disease resistance, and limited adaptability to the external environment, they cannot walk or feed on their own and depend entirely on their parent pigeons to carefully feed and raise their offspring.

In production, there are many issues that parent pigeons cannot attend to, requiring careful nursing by management personnel so that squabs can grow normally. To improve the productivity of breeding pigeons, if only 1 squab hatches from 2 eggs or 1 of 2 squabs dies, eggs with the same date and squabs of similar age can be paired and merged to reduce the parent pigeons incubating a single egg and feeding a single squab.

After 3 to 4 days from hatching, the squabs' eyes gradually open, their body feathers grow, they begin to move about, and their food intake increases day by day, while their digestive function strengthens, requiring the parent pigeons to feed them more. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the amount of nutritious feed for the breeding pigeons, such as increasing the feeding amount of beans to about double that for non-brooding pigeons. At the same time, the squabs' food intake and droppings gradually increase, which often contaminates the nest, so more clean linen cloths should be prepared and replaced promptly to prevent disease.

In addition, because the digestive organs of squabs are not yet fully developed during this period, if a small number of squabs cannot fully adapt to the feed fed by the parent pigeons, indigestion and ingluvitis often occur, and an appropriate amount of yeast tablets and other stomachic medicines can be fed to the squabs to aid digestion.