Doing all that is noted, still have frostbit comb tips?

[Mrs MIA]

This is what happens when inside the coop drops from 38°F to 0°F overnight, and is like that for 8 hours before you are aware of it. This was the night of November 14th, when we went from 40°F to -16°F (outside temps) overnight.

Lucas got the worst of it... see how swolen his wattles are?

I didn't get pictures of my SG Dorking, Jake, who has the single most biggest comb I have ever seen. He had blisters on the blade of his comb.

This is Jonathan, and he is the one that I slathered with Vaseline before the dip.

He is overwintering with us... does not belong to us, and I wasn't taking any chances. It would have served me better to listen to my intuition and not just stop with him, but we seriously were not expecting to drop 60° overnight. That doesn't usually happen until January. He still got a little nipped, but nothing major and you'd be hard-pressed to find any evidence of it now.

This is lucas as of Monday. Except for a little paleness around the edges of the wattles, and a little black on the blade, he is back to almost normal already. I slathered him with Vaseline 2x a day until the temps warmed up again. I even used a little neosporin when there were blisters.

It amazes me how resilient some of these birds are.

 

[HorseFeatherz NV]

The last few days we have also had abnormally low temps this week - one night -18.8 when I was expecting maybe 0 and the next -17. All of my poor roos and some of the hens show various degrees of frostbite.

 

[michickenwrangler]

My girls had frostbit tips this morning when I went out, some worse than others. Fred, the roo, oddly enough looked just fine. I picked everyone up and rubbed combs and wattles. I could feel the frozen tips. After the vaseline warms up, I'll go back out and rub again. When I was out feeding this morning, we had 3 eggs already out of 6 hens so I guess that they can't be that traumatized.

 

[djhowe69]

OMG! I forgot about the **** frostbite.
When I was 8 my parents got me a small flock of chickens to take care of . My roo (Roosty) got frostbitten tips the first winter

. I remember I was completely freaked out about it. The tips blackened and eventually fell of leaving one long thin scar down his once majestic comb. I don't recall him having any issues doing his duty with the girls after the fact.

Now some thirty years later I've acquired a brood for my 4 year old daughter to watch over. It's amazing how history seems to be deja vu-ing with her. She even named her roo Roosty and she adores that bird. She adores all of them, including their eggs. It took a couple days to get her to let go and start allowing us to put the eggs in the fridge.

The Old Farmer's Almanac is predicting an extremely cold winter this cycle. I am planning on insulating the coop area as well as I can. I use an entire bale of hay for bedding so they can bed down well, but I know that's not going to be good enough. I can use a couple heat lamps, but I am definitely gonna need a water heater for this coop. I remember as a kid the water was always frozen. I can up the feed rations and maybe add additional fat to their diet, but nothing will help an exposed comb.

Why are there rooster tukes or something like that available? Frostbite is gonna scare my daughter. If they had hats I don't think he would like wearing it, I had to splint Roosty's left leg this summer when he developed a limp and he didn't like the change at all of being immobilized. I wish there was a way to add a line to my outdoor wood boiler to put a base board heater in the coop or something along that line.