Many people do not know that chickens lay eggs according to the number of daylight hours. The shorter the days, the fewer the eggs, until they stop altogether and rest during the Winter. This is a time for them to rebuild the calcium in their bones that gets robbed to produce eggshells.

Commercial farmers add lighting to their coops to fool the hens into thinking that it is still time to lay eggs. They need the eggs to offset the cost of their chickens feed. I’m not trying to make this a commercial venture, so I give my girls a rest during the dark, cold months.

During this time I have to buy eggs and try not to think of my girls as a bunch of freeloaders. It gets hard right around Christmas when I’m baking trays and trays of cookies and going through cartons of store-bought eggs. I don’t know if the chickens tune in to my grumblings or if they are just feeling well-rested and generous, but every year right around the Winter solstice during the darkest time, they lay a few eggs for me. We were away and weren’t checking in the nest box, so when we got back we found this..

Thanks girls. Enjoy your Winter break.

The heat here has been unbelievable. Fiery pits of hell unbelievable. Who could deny global warming unbelievable. And the chickens are suffering because they stay outside in it all day long.

When people first talk to me about my chickens they inevitably worry about what I do with them in the winter. I usually mention that wild birds manage, mention that my girls have built-in down coats and then when they still look skeptical, I talk about how I have an insulated coop and wrap part of the run in a tarp to make a kind of hoop house.

But nobody ever wonders about the heat affects them. And man, it’s doing a number on them. They are panting their little chicken heads off. So what’s a good chicken keeper to do to keep chickens comfortable in the summer heat?

• Provide shade
• Provide access to water at all times

Kinda obvious, eh? Well here are some other things you can do.

• Freeze large blocks of ice and add them to their water dispenser. This will keep the water cool, which directly affects their temperature. You can add ice cubes, but they won’t last as long.
• Keep watermelon or even just the rinds (leave a little red on them still) in the fridge. Give those cold treats to them. Again, ingesting cool food/drink cools them off. I had some fruit that was getting a little old that I gave my gals.
• Hose down their run so that you can make little mud puddles, or give them a shallow wading pool. Cooling their feet helps them. Most chickens do not like water, so hosing them off can just add to their stress. There are chickens who like to be in the water. I saw a photo of one enjoying a slip ‘n slide.
• Make an air-conditioned room. Take a metal trash can, turn it on its side in the shade and place a large bottle with frozen water inside. They will hide from the sun inside, and the water bottle will cool the air around it.

I froze a big bottle of water with the idea of putting it in the area of their run that they were hanging out in. They had no interest in it, so we cut the ice out of it and put it in their huge water dispenser.

And my polish hen Andie has been sitting on the nest box for several days. At first I thought she might be egg-bound, but now I’m pretty sure she’s gone broody. More on that later.