I’ve seen people with chickens in outside in winter and was wondering whether that’s a good idea. Don’t they also need some kind of heating or warmth? My expectation was for their livable temperatures to be from 10-35C or something.
If you have enough, they’ll huddle up in the coop and be fine. There’s some discussion around how many in what size coop is necessary to ensure that. And, there’s still the necessity of the coop being adequately made so that there’s air flow, but not so much as to make it difficult for their own heat to work.
But chickens are little furnaces. You give them enough food, and access to water (when it’s cold they need water as much or more than food), and they can keep a coop well above freezing with little trouble in all but the worst weather.
We have so few birds that we can’t keep them outside in freezing weather, so I’ve forgotten all the stuff that goes into making sure they’re going to be in the right situation, but that info is out there.
For the most part, it’s iffy to heat a coop because of fire risks, or that’s the info I got.
I will say this though. We’re up in the mountains a bit, so it gets cold. One of our birds is half feral and refuses to stay in the coop at all. She sleeps in a tree, or in a shrubbery (ni), and has not run into any trouble yet. We’re working on getting her tame enough to at least share space with the rooster on the porch, but it’s slow going.
But some of the neighbors have lost birds to cold in the past, even in coops; and the feral flock tends to fluctuate down in size a lot more in winter than summer.
For real though, ours are pets, and rather pampered overall. When they’re cuddled up with one of us, we can break a sweat from their heat.
Updoot for the samurai-knight who says: “Ni!”
Kind of a tangent, but their body temp is also why bird flu is such a big deal.
A fever isnt straight up caused by illness, it’s a protection system because the heat will kill the virus.
Because chickens have such a high basal temperature, when stuff jumps from birds to mamals, it’s already evolved to handle the highest temps a human can get to. So we lose one of the best tools in our natural toolbox to fight it
Eh, you can get ceramic heat bulbs that are pretty safe.
True, true.
Nah, that’s why chicken coops are a thing.
Like, if you just had a single chicken, it would not be happy.
But 3-5 chickens snuggled in a coop are going to be absolutely fine because they bunch up and share body heat. It’s like the one scenario chickens use teamwork. Although I’m pretty sure each individual chicken is just trying to keep itself warm
The coop has to be protected from wind and rain, right? It shouldn’t just be open, I imagine.
Yes.
A coop is a structure with a roof and four walls, even at least one opening that can be used to enter and exit the coop.
The roof and walls are what keeps out wind and rain.
Hmmm, the ones I saw were basically just roofs with cage wires as “walls”. And there were multiple. It felt like I had to call animals services, but my knowledge of chicken is just pretty much non-existent besides “they lay eggs and can’t fly”.
They can fly
Long story, but after some recreational activities I was driving a scooter about 45mph down a mountain and a chicken flew across the road and hit me directly in the chest.
Chickens, turkeys, peacocks, etc aren’t going to soar thru the air. But it’s not exactly hard for them to get 15-20 feet off the ground and they can stretch it pretty far especially when going from high to low ground.
As other folks have pointed out they will need shelter of some form at or below freezing temperatures. A regular coop works extremely well
My quail pen is a wire coop, which than has a real 4 walled coop inside
Think of a doghouse
It’s uncited but this is what the hive mind has to say:
Gallinaceous birds are well adapted to regions with cold winters. Their larger size, increased plumage, and lower activity levels help them to withstand the cold and conserve energy. Under such conditions, they are able to change their feeding strategy to that of a ruminant. This allows them to feed on and extract energy and nutrients from coarse, fibrous plant material, such as buds, twigs, and conifer needles.
Then again, the chicken is directly descended from the red junglefowl, which lives in steamy hot tropical forests. Personally, if I were a chicken I’d be pretty pissed at having to endure freezing temperatures without central heating but presumably this is just a projection of my weak constitution as a domesticated humanoid.
