Before I built the Chicken Palace I used a very large dog crate to move the ladies into the garage at night when the weather was truly awful. I made a little roost out of 2x4 and I put the crate on a garden cart so I could pull it in and park it in the garage without lifting it. Actually it only took a couple of nights of really bad weather for them to learn to follow me into the garage at bedtime and then back out in the morning.Excellent points, Kris! Thank you. I will keep an eye on the fraying potential. That is so sad! I am so sorry you lost a bird that way!
We can get very strong winds here. We are at high elevation (for our area) and open on the north and north-west. The house and garage/barn are blocking a lot, but some diverted wind makes it around. I did have a horrible cartwheel incident when only the top and a couple of tarps were on, and no stakes or cinder blocks positioned there to help hold it down either. Now I have both, with additional stakes to hammer in still. I've been observing it and it isn't swaying at all (yet). I was thinking that having it better enclosed would help because the wind can't (theoretically) get "in" to lift, and that may be helping now, but I am keeping an eye on it all. I recognize that a failure in one part could cascade to the kite scenario.
Plan B in potentially bad weather is to unhook the coop & coop run from the walk-in run via the re-useable zip-ties. Then if the walk-in run rolls it won't take the coop run & coop with it.
Plan C is to unhook it and move the coop & coop run into the garage in place of my car. Easy to do prior to the ground freezing, otherwise the skirting frozen to the ground will prevent moving it at all (actually helping everything stay in place - the skirting attachments can be removed if I have to move it, though they may be encased in ice too). This last summer I moved the coop around within a small protected wooded clearing which was good for weathering storms, but then I didn't need electric to it.
Plan D, maybe the easiest in a pinch, but more stress for them, is to get a large enough dog crate that the four birds could spend the night in inside the garage or here in the house. I still need to do that. I have a large cat carrier I have used for transport to free-range areas when they were smaller chicks, which could fit one but is now too small for four of them at once. It's on my list as it would be good for quarantine/hospital times, or the famous broody breaking I hear a lot about. Is there a recommended size? I will search.
Thank you for looking and assessing, I REALLY appreciate it!
I put a puppy pee pad in the bottom of the crate. They seemed very happy and cozy with the dog crate. No stress at all.
Sure there were about 10 roosted inappropriately on the sink, stove, and counter, but they were all in the trailer where they belonged! And none on the range hood today, I still don’t know how she managed to get up there and perch on the slanted metal, she must be part fur chicken (cat). I relocated the randomly roosted birds, tied everything up for the night and went to close the rest in.
