It takes a poultryman about as long to become experienced in diagnosing his poultry ills as it does for a person to study medicine and become a medical doctor. We can appreciate how hard it is for a doctor to properly diagnose a case when we go to the yards of some friend who is having trouble and try to find out where the trouble is. Occasionally we can see it at a glance and again it takes the skill of an experienced detective to find out just what is the trouble.

In this case I had traced everything down to its last analysis I thought, but I had left out one step the first couple times in asking about the water supply.

Will you believe me then, when I say the whole trouble was in a new deep driven well. As mentioned, I asked a couple times about the water supply and got the answer that it came from the new well but I forgot to ask if he was taking the chill off the water before he filled the fountains each morning. Here was the secret; possibly you have had the same trouble. He was giving them wonderful pure, clean fresh water, but it was too cold. Fowls drink the first thing in the morning and the little chicks came out and filled themselves with this cold water with the result that it disarranged their little digestive systems. Nature had not intended that little chicks should drink such cold water and had not provided a system to withstand water very near the freezing point to go into bodies above 100 degrees F.

As a result, a few would succumb to this treatment in spite of all the pure food and clean, fresh water and natural surroundings. When the chill was taken off the water after that the trouble immediately disappeared.

Many people do not have any trouble with their early chicks, but state positively that they cannot raise their late hatched chicks, although they declare they give them the same care and attention. The matter of cold water may give a clue to some of their trouble. The early chicks come off at a season when the mornings are chilling and you put a little warm water in without giving it a second thought. But as the warm days of late May and June come and you have so many chicks to look after you go to the pump and fill up a pail of the ice cold fresh water and give it to the newly hatched, as well as the older ones. The older ones are old enough to stand it while the newly hatched die on your hands in spite of all you can do. If you have figured you are right on every other move you make with these late chicks try lukewarm water on the next batch of late chicks and see what success you have. Remember the water out of the deep well is just as cold in June as in March and the chill should be taken off then just the same as in February or March, for the newly hatched chicks.