Heat wave

It’s unusually hot here for British summer. We often only get a few days to a week of warm weather at a time and twenty one degrees celsius or seventy degrees fahrenheit or a little above is usually the top temperature. At the moment we are experiencing thirty degrees celsius or ninety degrees fahrenheit and it’s forecast to last a month. That’s a heat wave to us.

I know from my fellow American chicken bloggers that they experience much more extreme weather conditions than we do, hot and cold, but for us this is unusual.

Last year we had one of the wettest summers on record, it really did rain all summer long. This year it was one of the coldest summers on record up until this hot spell and now this is being hailed as a possible contender for the hottest spell on record! This is after the weather “experts” said we may have no summer for the next ten to twenty years! What is it with the British and their endless obsession with the weather and I have to include myself in that statement! We can’t help it, we all speculate about it, check the reports and talk about it endlessly. It is one of the things that makes us British!

Chickens cope well with the cold but they don’t like the heat. My girls haven’t experienced this heat before. The dominiques are cold hardy with a layer of down underneath their feathers and are not so suited to the hot weather.

I am lucky that their run is at the top of our garden and shaded by tall trees behind the garden. It gets the morning sun but by midday is in shade. Even so I do all I can to keep the girls cool.

The automatic coop door opens at five o’clock in the morning at this time of year and at that time it’s still cool.

At midday I change their water for fresh cold water in both drinkers and I water a shaded area of the soil to keep the area near their favourite bush cool. I give them treats such as melon, cucumber, grapes and apples to give them extra moisture.

In the evening when they settle on the high perch I leave it until eleven o’clock to put them to bed instead of the usual ten o’clock. This means the coop is cool when they go in.

I check regularly for the dreaded red mite as they thrive in hot weather and sprinkle D.E. everywhere. So far I have managed to avoid them.

I also poop pick the run a minimum of three times a day, often a lot more, sometimes every time I go in there. This keeps down flies and means there isn’t much to pick up each time.

I shall keep up this regime as long as the hot spell lasts. My girls are doing okay. The worst bit is when they want to lay their egg in a warm coop at the hottest part of the day. The bantys have taken a week off laying since the beginning of the hot spell and I don’t blame them.

The bonus is that the girls have also stopped feather pulling since the start of the hot weather because instead of sitting in a huddle in the afternoons they sit spaced out due to the heat, which puts them out of reach for feather pulling.  I am becoming quite hopeful that this problem has finally turned a corner.