- Jul 8, 2013
- 11
- 1
- 24
I'm in NH and dealing with the same weather you are, LadyCluck, but it's the freezing temps we had a couple weeks ago - combined with hectic work schedules - that has really taken a toll. Oh, and inexperience. This is the first year I've had chickens and my daughter and son-in-law also got chickens this past Summer. I haven't lost any. My daughter hasn't been so lucky.
And mostly it was dumb luck on my part. The location of my coop was part of it. It's attached to my back porch, so the house provides a good deal of shelter from wind. I only have 7 hens and my coop is fairly small so the body heat of the chickens themselves would keep that fairly warm. I was giving them warm water every morning along with warm soaked oats on the coldest days (dumb luck - I just figured "who doesn't like warm oatmeal for breakfast on a cold day?") and just keeping the food constantly full. I was having issues with the water freezing (and I often work 12-15 hour days, so bringing them water on a regular basis was out of the question) but the major problem was that the chicken yard is covered by plastic chicken fencing to keep neighborhood strays out and it's not letting the snow fall through. I've been expecting it to collapse since the last heavy snowfall a couple weeks back.
My daughter, meanwhile, has a bigger coop, bigger chicken yard (the boundaries of which her chickens completely ignore, choosing to scale the fence and free-range) and started out with nearly 30 chickens. She's been having the same water issues I have - and with disastrous consequences. I'm pretty sure the bulk of her problem has just been in not being able to provide enough fresh, LIQUID water. She also had a red lamp in her coop and I'm not so sure that didn't add to the problems rather than helping. Either way, she's lost nearly half her flock one and two at a time beginning around the time we had that deep freeze about a month ago. Her coop and yard sit mostly in the open, without a wind break. She and her husband have spent a good deal of money and time insulating the coop and trying to give the flock a warm place to roost but still they were dying. Their birds were never meant to be meat birds, they're more like pets and it's been very upsetting to them.
Anyway, because we're fighting a losing battle against the elements at this point, all the chickens - theirs and mine - are now being housed in a semi-finished room in my basement. We had ferrets years ago, when my girls were both still single and living at home, and I had finished a room for them in the basement with plywood walls, a raised floor and a wire mesh door. It took little effort to clean out the stuff that's been stored there since the last of the ferrets died a few years back. I added some perches, a nest box and some hooks in the ceiling so I can hang water and food, put down a nice, cushy layer of shavings and transported all the chickens into it a week ago. I have a wood stove down there but I only light it if the temp gets down near freezing. Mostly, the temp stays in a range of 40-50 degrees all winter. I didn't think it would do the chickens much good to raise it above that specifically for them and see from posts in this thread that I was probably right. I have lighting on a timer but I'm keeping it pretty close to normal daylight hours. Shavings are cheap (thankfully) so I'm just sweeping out the whole lot once a week and replacing with fresh.
My girls were just "eh, cool. We're dry and there's no snow overhead threatening to crush us." Her chickens - after going through four gallons of water in the first 12 hours - have gone from lethargic and not laying to active and laying again! There's one I'm still keeping an eye on as she seems to be recovering more slowly than the others but all of them are looking MUCH better after a week inside! I've seen a few suggestions here that I should probably act on even though they're protected from the worst of the elements but, otherwise, this appears to have been about the best emergency measure we could have taken. I'd prefer not to have chickens in my basement every Winter, though, so we'll be spending this Summer designing and building better coops and runs!
And mostly it was dumb luck on my part. The location of my coop was part of it. It's attached to my back porch, so the house provides a good deal of shelter from wind. I only have 7 hens and my coop is fairly small so the body heat of the chickens themselves would keep that fairly warm. I was giving them warm water every morning along with warm soaked oats on the coldest days (dumb luck - I just figured "who doesn't like warm oatmeal for breakfast on a cold day?") and just keeping the food constantly full. I was having issues with the water freezing (and I often work 12-15 hour days, so bringing them water on a regular basis was out of the question) but the major problem was that the chicken yard is covered by plastic chicken fencing to keep neighborhood strays out and it's not letting the snow fall through. I've been expecting it to collapse since the last heavy snowfall a couple weeks back.
My daughter, meanwhile, has a bigger coop, bigger chicken yard (the boundaries of which her chickens completely ignore, choosing to scale the fence and free-range) and started out with nearly 30 chickens. She's been having the same water issues I have - and with disastrous consequences. I'm pretty sure the bulk of her problem has just been in not being able to provide enough fresh, LIQUID water. She also had a red lamp in her coop and I'm not so sure that didn't add to the problems rather than helping. Either way, she's lost nearly half her flock one and two at a time beginning around the time we had that deep freeze about a month ago. Her coop and yard sit mostly in the open, without a wind break. She and her husband have spent a good deal of money and time insulating the coop and trying to give the flock a warm place to roost but still they were dying. Their birds were never meant to be meat birds, they're more like pets and it's been very upsetting to them.
Anyway, because we're fighting a losing battle against the elements at this point, all the chickens - theirs and mine - are now being housed in a semi-finished room in my basement. We had ferrets years ago, when my girls were both still single and living at home, and I had finished a room for them in the basement with plywood walls, a raised floor and a wire mesh door. It took little effort to clean out the stuff that's been stored there since the last of the ferrets died a few years back. I added some perches, a nest box and some hooks in the ceiling so I can hang water and food, put down a nice, cushy layer of shavings and transported all the chickens into it a week ago. I have a wood stove down there but I only light it if the temp gets down near freezing. Mostly, the temp stays in a range of 40-50 degrees all winter. I didn't think it would do the chickens much good to raise it above that specifically for them and see from posts in this thread that I was probably right. I have lighting on a timer but I'm keeping it pretty close to normal daylight hours. Shavings are cheap (thankfully) so I'm just sweeping out the whole lot once a week and replacing with fresh.
My girls were just "eh, cool. We're dry and there's no snow overhead threatening to crush us." Her chickens - after going through four gallons of water in the first 12 hours - have gone from lethargic and not laying to active and laying again! There's one I'm still keeping an eye on as she seems to be recovering more slowly than the others but all of them are looking MUCH better after a week inside! I've seen a few suggestions here that I should probably act on even though they're protected from the worst of the elements but, otherwise, this appears to have been about the best emergency measure we could have taken. I'd prefer not to have chickens in my basement every Winter, though, so we'll be spending this Summer designing and building better coops and runs!
