I'm usually an avid weather report-watcher (an old habit since Hurricane Andrew) but somehow missed the last few days. So today's afternoon thunderstorms came as a complete surprise. It's been so DRY for so LONG I got out of the habit of watching for rain. Here in West Palm Beach it hit around 3:30 I think. Already there is 1.5 inches of rain in the gauge and it seems there is more on its way. Yay!
But my poor little chickies! Each spring I get a lot of schoolteachers wanting fertile eggs to hatch in their classrooms, they usually return the hatched chicks to me. So I have pens of chicks of all ages in the yard. I only keep the youngest ones indoors, and then only after dark, the rest stay in bottomless cages out in the grass. There was one pen with about 2 dozen of the youngest, from 1-2 weeks old that I thought was covered well enough against rain. But after seeing how hard the wind was blowing, how the rain was coming almost horizontally, I decided to run out in the storm to check on these chickies.
I'm so glad I checked them when I did, they were all soaking wet, completely chilled, cheeping miserably. I yelled to my boys to come out quick, we grabbed them all, carrying them in our shirtfronts to bring inside. I put them all in a box, put a desk lamp over them, rubbed them each with a towel. Then I added a jar with hot water to the middle of the box, and fixed my favorite chick booster, scrambled eggs with garlic powder.
I was afraid I'd lose some, the littlest ones were so pathetic, so cold, lying on the floor with their eyes closed. But they have all dried off nicely now, all fluffy & peeping & bippity-bopping around. Thank you Lord!
How did you & your flocks fare in this storm?
