Hen Chronicles: Helping "the girls" keep their cool

It seems natural to worry more about keeping chickens warm in the winter than cool in the summer, but it turns out those priorities should be reversed.

“Chickens actually handle cold better than heat, as long as their shelter is dry and out of the wind,” Kimberly Willis and Rob Ludlow write in Raising Chickens for Dummies. As for summer: “When the temperature rises above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, especially when the humidity is high, it’s time to check on the chickens. If your birds are subjected to heat stress for too long, they’ll die.”
 
That caught my attention.

My limited experience with chickens has confirmed that they do, indeed, hold their own during the winter. We lost one hen last December, but she died while molting early in the month, when the ground had yet to freeze. Snow and Nala, the surviving hens, got through the winter just fine. Even on January 24, when it was 5 degrees below zero at dawn with a wind chill of minus 20, Snow and Nala were active, hungry and seemingly comfortable.

The heat, though, is another story. Earlier this month, the temperature here in central Maine reached or exceeded 90 degrees every day for a week, peaking at 93/94 a few times. That may not be stifling where you come from, but it’s hellish (literally) by Maine standards.

We had four hens by then - Snow and Nala, as well as two younger newcomers, Hope and Nellie. “The girls” seemed fine in the coop at night, when the mercury dropped enough to make life bearable for them, but they obviously were stressed out during the day.

Feathers, like fur, insulate.

I did my best to keep the hens cool, using an old patio umbrella, a tarp and pieces of plywood to shade the pen that is attached to the coop. The hens also had the option of resting under the elevated coop, where it is dark and, presumably, a bit cooler. Chickens supposedly dislike warm water, so I gave them cold water periodically, sometimes adding ice cubes to keep it cool longer.

But the girls obviously were uncomfortable. For one thing, they were breathing with their mouths open. Fortunately, they were not holding their wings out, away from their bodies. From what I’ve read, that means the heat is really getting to them. 

There was only so much I could do; controlling the weather wasn't in my tool kit. Then I stumbled upon a suggestion in an online forum from a chicken owner who places one or more frozen bottles of water in his pen. The idea is to give the hens something cool to brush up against in the heat of the day.

It sounded crazy, but what did I have to lose? I bought a 2-liter bottle of ginger ale, the contents of which my wife Liz emptied into a pitcher. Filling the bottle with water, I stuck it in the freezer. It didn’t do us any good that day; it takes a long time to freeze the contents of a large bottle. But the following morning, the bottle was hard as a rock and just as heavy. When the temperature topped 90 later that day, I brought it out to the four-foot-by-six-foot pen and placed it inside.

I don’t really know if my experiment worked; I didn’t see any of the hens snuggled up against my “air conditioner” when I went back out to check on them. Maybe they sidled up to it when I wasn’t looking. Maybe not. Either way, it took a long time for that block of ice to melt, and that left me feeling that I was doing what I could to help the girls cope.

Chicken air conditioning?