Winter Special-Frozen Eggs

People always ask me about how the chickens survive during the cold winter months. My answer is always the same....chickens are amazing creatures! They actually do better in the colder temperatures compared to the hot summer months.

My roosting bar, believe it or not, there are 14 chickens in there.

A chicken's body temperature is set between 105 to 108 degrees Fahrenheit, which is much warmer than a human's body temperature. They also have ten to fourteen layers of feathers attached to their small bodies. When the weather gets extremely cold, they fluff out all their feathers to trap air between each layer, creating a heating pad around their body. My coop has two planks of wood for the chickens to roost on at night. The fourteen chickens roost almost on top of each other in the small space to keep warm.

In other words, chickens do pretty well in the winter with their feathery coat. When the weather gets below zero, my older chickens who are three years old will not lay eggs. They use all their extra energy to provide warmth instead of creating eggs in their stomach. My eight month old chickens have no problems laying eggs in the extreme cold. Their young bodies are creating eggs like crazy and I get one to two eggs per day no matter what the temperature is like outside.

Some of my other chicken friends struggle to get eggs from their chickens December through March, and we always compare how many eggs we are collecting. Based on our comparisons in chicken raising, I believe the other reason I continually get eggs is that my chickens free range. Unless there is five inches of snow on the ground, my chickens walk around the yard all day every day pecking the ground for bugs, sticks, dirt, etc. Being exposed to that extra nutrition and sunlight makes my flock egg happy. But, it also means I lose chickens a bit more often to predators than other people who keep their chickens solely in a coop.

The week before Christmas this past year, I had a newer chicken experience. The weather around my neck of the woods had an arctic like blast, and the temperatures with windchill, plummeted between negative 20 to negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit. I put a small heater in the coop to try to keep some of the chill out of the air. That week I really feared that I might lose some of the flock to the extreme cold weather. Every morning when I walked out to the coop, I said a small prayer asking God to give me strength if I found a frozen chicken (if you didn't know this about me, I'm very fond of my birdies). And every morning, I praised God when I found all of the chickens healthy and clucking at me for treats.

The favorite, very handmade, nesting box.

My coop has about ten nesting boxes for the chickens to lay their eggs, but like children, they all fight over the one nesting box. One chicken will be laying her egg in the favorite box while the other chickens wait in the coop clucking as loud as they can because they are waiting for their turn to lay their egg. It's like having one bathroom in a house of fourteen people, and they are all needing to go number two at the same time.

So I always have a chicken sitting on top of the eggs almost every minute during the day. This normally prevents the eggs from freezing during the winter time. When one of the eggs is close to freezing, that's about the time when another chicken comes to lay her eggs which heats the cold egg back up.

The Cracked Egg

The week of the arctic blast, I had to throw out my first ever frozen egg in the three years I've owned chickens. The eggs were freezing seconds after being laid, it was crazy! That's how cold it was that week! It's possible to eat an egg that has frozen a little bit on the inside, but once the shell cracks, the egg is considered unsafe to eat because of the bacteria that has seeped inside the egg. I not only had to throw out one egg that week, I had to throw out two dozen frozen eggs. They got thrown out in the woods so other hungry animals could get some use out of my wasted eggs.

Thankfully ever since that arctic blast, we've had somewhat of a mild winter. This week, it actually go up to 55 degrees one day....that day the girls laid me a dozen eggs! They were so happy to have some sunshine and nice weather.

I do have a small prayer request. My rooster, Clifford, might need to be culled...which in chicken language means, he might need to go to chicken "heaven". He attacked me pretty good last week and left a bruise on my calf. I pray that he mellows out a little bit, because I love him....but it's not looking good right now. I keep telling him, "I'm not a predator, I'm your mommy!" but he's being a dumb bird and not listening to me while I feed him tons of treats. I've always heard the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, but with Clifford, it's just not working.

Thanks for reading my Country Squawk,

Kelly