Poultry Pages

Poultry Help & Information - Chickens Keeping

Winter Chores for the Hen House - by Muntjac

OK it's winter ( or supposed to be ) and egg production is down now with the shorter days . Some of your birds will be still laying enough, I hope, to keep you ticking over in the kitchen depending on how many you have to start with, of course.

I have 183 at present and am still getting 4 dozen eggs a day or thereabouts so I'm ticking along nicely. But now is the time we should be looking at making sure our birds are well prepared for what the winter may throw at us.

What we do not want again here at the most easterly point is a another year like 1996 , where we had minus 14C and wind-chill of minus –30C reported. The losses to wildlife were massive here.

I was feeding corn, wheat, barley and crushed maize to my pheasants just for them to be able to survive this time but still we found birds frozen to death lying in the ice and snow. Chicken and poultry keepers fared no better with whole flocks of backyard birds dead, ducks frozen to the ice and sheep dead in snowdrifts .

So I took a big lesson from my dad during those weeks as during the 1963 weather he had saved all of his birds with no losses at all . He prepared well in advance as he knew the weather was coming, heeding the warnings. He put bales of straw around the hens house and stretched tarpaulins over these to shelter the houses.

The hens lived in a hen house within a bale house, his ducks he moved indoors as well as the turkeys and geese. Water birds can get very stressed out during confinement so he catered for that by building a small reservoir with bales and railway sleepers and a waterproof sheet with a few planks to let them in and out. So the birds did their prison time content.

So why am I waffling? Well now before the weather does turn cold is the time to get the hens houses sorted.

Draughts are the biggest killer of hens, so make sure that problem is sorted. Build a wind break now to the coop door. Use a pallet or two and make a wind baffle, face the opening to the south . Look to leave extra feed out on the very coldest of nights. The action of turning corn to poop creates energy i.e. warmth.

If necessary run a light lead to the coop , the birds will rest with a light on as they will in the dark, the heat from that single bulb in a 10ft by 6ft shed will raise the temperature a few degrees. Don't forget the water drinkers as they will freeze and do not for any reason do what I know one novice keeper did and put a hand full of salt in the water thinking that it would keep the ice off. It didn't but he had no birds to worry about anyways as he had poisoned them.

Another thing you want to be doing is putting a coat of paint or preservative on the sheds, make sure it is suitable for use on a poultry house first though. (Most builders merchants sell preservatives that are safe for bats and, therefore, safe for chickens)

Check glass in windows , does it rattle? If it does then that is a draught the birds can do without. Double check your door bolts locks etc. as foxes get very hungry in winter.
You may have bred your own birds this last season so take up your brooder pens and give them a clean out with Jeyes Fluid and a spruce up with a coat of paint etc.

Now is the time rats will come in from the fields and dykes and try to take up residence under your sheds. Don't just look at the under floor but look in the roof as well. If you have someplace where you can do this cleanup work undercover, all the better.

You may be able to convert pallets into new brooder pens and runs as I do. They sell as well in the spring.

Oh and for a book on building small poultry sheds for the beginner, I can recommend the following the following from the Golden Cockerel series: Poultry House Construction (Gold Cockerel)

My kids bought me this because they thought I should get some designer pens built for yuppies and these with a multi coloured lick of paint or posh yacht varnish would compete with the new plastic rubbish argo or arko or whatever they call them and I'm glad to say with a little bit of freedom to change things they do. Best of all, at less than half the cost of commercial sheds and the plastic stuff.

Resources

• Build Your Own Poultry House & Run - £3.00 - Full Details
• Poultry House Construction (Gold Cockerel)