Frozen water bowls?

[SpottedCrow]

Of course, I thank my girls...they're doing all the work to pop out that massive thing every day...LOL

 

[arkansas_ash]

I know this is an old thread but it still pops up in search engines when doing a search on chickens plus frozen water bowls.
Just sharing a recent experience we had where we went to visit family and had left our eight 6 mo. old chickens enough extra water to have access to while we were gone for 5 days. While away, the temperature had dropped to 20 degrees F. and the high only got up to 32 with wind gusts that kept the "real feal" temperature low, in spite of the partly sunny day. That night the temperature fell to 22 and warmed up to 44 the next day, which was cloudy, (according to the weather data I checked on the internet.) That means their water bowls were frozen for probably a day and a half. We came home to find one of the young hens dead and from her positioning, she either died while on the roost or while in the corner of the chicken house in a nest area the hens had made. These hens have just started laying in the past 4 weeks. I don't know for sure what caused her to die, but I am guessing she could have had a stuck egg due to dehydration. Just a guess as there were no wounds on her and they all appeared healthy and laying well before we left.
I am now in the process of finding a cheap water bowl heater so that this won't happen next time we have to leave and a cold snap occurs. I made the mistake of going by the weather forecast I had watched before we left. The meteorologist said it was supposed to get up to 37 degrees and I assumed that that would help melt the top of their water bowls, which it has in the past when I didn't get to a water bowl in time during a single day. I didn't think about wind chill factor and then the fact that the temp. dropped lower than predicted. Maybe she died of something else or she was "weeded out" by the weather conditions, but I don't want my chickens to go a day without having water access in the future, especially when their are affordable devices to keep the water thawed.
I thought I was the only one that thanked my girls for laying eggs. When I put them up for the night, I say, "Thanks girls for the eggs" in a sing song fashion.

 

[rosemarythyme]

Maybe she died of something else or she was "weeded out" by the weather conditions, but I don't want my chickens to go a day without having water access in the future, especially when their are affordable devices to keep the water thawed.

Sorry that you lost a bird, possibly due to dehydration. During winter I keep my heated waterer on at all times, rather than trying to guess if it might be warm enough/not warm enough to keep the water liquid. For the same reason I switched off from a vertical nipple waterer as the nipple was freezing even if the water stayed liquid inside.

 

[arkansas_ash]

Thank you for that. Good common sense tip.