Another, All of a sudden

Whenever I get a call from Cindy during my drive into work my first reaction is always, what’s wrong?   So when the phone lit up in the car today my assumption was it wasn’t good news.  Unfortunately I was right.  Cindy walked into the coop this morning to find another chicken dead on the floor, it was Dot, one of the two white Delaware hens we got in our last batch of chicks a couple years ago.  I have not been able to review the coop video yet but we are assuming she fell somehow and broke her neck when she hit the ground.  We have now had several hens apparently die in a similar manner and it is very frustrating.

When we first saw this happen I dramatically reduced the height of the perch but even after doing that we still have had birds fall and die.  One issue we have is under the perch we have rubber mats which make it easy to clean daily.  Most perches have some sort of material under them like wood shavings which you change every week maybe, a much messier and smellier solution.  The negative is a rubber mat provides no cushion if a bird falls.

However as I did some Googling this morning I have discovered something I never knew, despite owning chickens for well over 5 years at this point.  Chickens typically sleep flat footed and don’t grasp a conventional rounded perch, instead they just would sort of balance on it.  This revelation all of a sudden made a lot of sense.  The hens have always seemed to favor the back of the perch where there is wider flat surface as well as the sides which are made of 2×4.  Dot was found in the middle of the floor, where the conventional smaller, rounded perches are. I am somewhat angry at myself for not finding this out earlier.  This weekend I will be doing a perch overhaul which may include lowering it further but definitely covering all of the rounded perches with flat wood that is easy for the hens to rest on.  We are now down to 5 birds, it’s crazy.

So all of sudden yesterday news of a potential storm threat popped up in our area.  At this point the thing is still only a tropical depression but the cone of uncertainty projections were all that was needed to get people’s attention.  The “good” news is strength-wise it currently isn’t projected to be a monster.  Also the projected path has consistently been shifting westward, now off of Florida’s west coast as of this morning.  However if I have learned anything from living in Florida the last 20 years, it is that hurricane forecasting is a fuzzy science, at best.

To make matters worse there is another tropical system towards Mexico that has the possibility of reaching hurricane strength by the time it impacts Texas/Louisiana.  The idea of having TWO hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time is an extreme, terrible rarity.

Of course my weekend plans are going to need to be malleable based on how the storm predictions progress.  Regardless of path I don’t see it as being a board up level of storm for us but there still would be a TON of things that would need to be secured/put away for safety.  Chicken perch rework will be high on the to do list as well.