FunClucks
Crowing
So at 5:30am I sent my son out to do chicken chores, and he came back in a panic telling me there was a flood. No weather alerts came to my phone (I'm signed up for everything), no warnings ahead of time that there might be anything wrong, and I'm not in a flood zone, so this was totally unexpected. Two of the coops were fine but flooded - one of those didn't have high enough perches so the chickens were swimming on their last energy. The third coop was not fine, the top had caved in due to catching water, and smashed a chicken. I couldn't open the door, so we had to cut a hole in the hardware cloth and chain link in the pouring rain to crawl in and rescue the chickens that were huddled on the side of the isolation pen tower. Thank God I recently had the bright idea of stacking up some dog crates as an isolation cage and broody breaker, or we wouldn't have been able to rescue any chickens from that coop. I had staked the dog crates to the ground with 12" landscape stakes and ziptied a smaller crate on top of the large one. It held up to I don't even know how many pounds of water enough so that most of the chickens could congregate on a higher surface.
3 chickens drowned and one was smashed, including my favorite chicken, Chipmunk. We are all so sad about it.
The rest of them miraculously made it. I moved 6 dry 3-month olds in with the big eggers, and 30 chickens (3-month olds plus all the remaining meat chickens/red stars and all of my POL green eggers) went into the bathrooms in the house. One needed a bath to get the mulch out of her feathers, and about ten of them required the hair dryer to make a recovery. Several I was really not sure would make it, but they perked up, and are doing ok now.
And of course I have to work today. Hopefully by the time I finish work, the water will have drained from the third coop tarp and I'll be able to start reconstruction there. The 16 chickens in the brooders in the garage have got to get back outside, but I don't have anywhere to put them yet. And of course it's supposed to possibly flood again tonight, so I have to go get a bunch of pallets to provide high perches in the still working coop that didn't have them...
And yet, I've collected 7 eggs so far today, including 3 eggs from green eggers who had taken an involuntary swim in the coop that collapsed, and from all of my big eggers who were laying. The flood water all went away, and sodden mulch was left, so the big eggers got down from their perch and started laying their eggs in the formerly flooded nest boxes. (I put dry shavings in those after providing food and water.) Chickens are amazingly resilient creatures.
So I'm sad we lost 4, but glad most of them are ok. It was so bad it almost flooded our house. We were going to evacuate, but the road was underwater.
We found a full grown crayfish in the middle of the yard as the flood was receding and rehomed it to the creek at the end of the street, so that was a fun kid activity.
How does the weather service miss something like that???
3 chickens drowned and one was smashed, including my favorite chicken, Chipmunk. We are all so sad about it.
The rest of them miraculously made it. I moved 6 dry 3-month olds in with the big eggers, and 30 chickens (3-month olds plus all the remaining meat chickens/red stars and all of my POL green eggers) went into the bathrooms in the house. One needed a bath to get the mulch out of her feathers, and about ten of them required the hair dryer to make a recovery. Several I was really not sure would make it, but they perked up, and are doing ok now.
And of course I have to work today. Hopefully by the time I finish work, the water will have drained from the third coop tarp and I'll be able to start reconstruction there. The 16 chickens in the brooders in the garage have got to get back outside, but I don't have anywhere to put them yet. And of course it's supposed to possibly flood again tonight, so I have to go get a bunch of pallets to provide high perches in the still working coop that didn't have them...
And yet, I've collected 7 eggs so far today, including 3 eggs from green eggers who had taken an involuntary swim in the coop that collapsed, and from all of my big eggers who were laying. The flood water all went away, and sodden mulch was left, so the big eggers got down from their perch and started laying their eggs in the formerly flooded nest boxes. (I put dry shavings in those after providing food and water.) Chickens are amazingly resilient creatures.
So I'm sad we lost 4, but glad most of them are ok. It was so bad it almost flooded our house. We were going to evacuate, but the road was underwater.
We found a full grown crayfish in the middle of the yard as the flood was receding and rehomed it to the creek at the end of the street, so that was a fun kid activity.
How does the weather service miss something like that???
. I'm so glad that the rest are ok. They must have been in shock. Thank you for sharing!
