It looks a lot warmer in PA than it does in AL. The grass is so green in your photos. Our lawn has been dead for weeks now (well, the parts that still have grass, anyway). We had about 5 inches of snow last week and the temperature is dropping like a stone tonight down to 11F. I think the Canucks left the back door open again. Sub freezing temperatures for 4 days in a row in AL is definitely a climate change, but it blows the global warming idea out of the water (or ice as the case may be). We’ve had a soggy few weeks and some hard freezing to go with it, so most of the yard is mud.
A neighbor had some very overcrowded conditions with a little chicken tractor that he bought for 8 chickens (too many) and he and his wife wound up doing too much chicken math which resulted in 12 birds in a coop that never should have had more than 4 in it. He has very limited carpentry skills and apparently little chicken expertise, so I volunteered to help solve the problem. Turns out his poor birds also had a mite infestation and are missing way too many feathers for our current weather situation. So I jumped through hoops while the weather was warm and built enough 4-foot wide panels for a 16x8 pen and relocated an old rabbit hutch he had to get his birds out of the tiny infested coop. We clad the rabbit hutch with OSB, and put a tin roof on it and then erected the pen around it so they now have at least 4x the space they had, both in the run and the coop.
In that project, I managed to make some serious ruts in his yard that was very soggy after last week’s snow and heavy rain on Friday night. Handling the rabbit hutch on my clamp on forks sunk the front wheels nearly halfway in the ground and the rear wheels were at least 10 inches deep in the mud I stirred up.
But, we managed to produce twelve wall panels and four roof panels that make up the 16x8 pen in 2 days and constructed the pen in about 4 hours, not including the time to modify the rabbit cage. The temperature was 28F last night by the time we finished treating the birds and transferred them to the new pen. They were pretty excited about having room to get away from each other after spending their entire lives in a tiny 4x8 enclosure. His birds are twice the age of mine, but less than half the size and body weight. He understands a lot more about chickens than he did before when we compared them to our own chickens and how they were raised and cared for. Ours get more attention than I do. We started with 6, lost one that decided to dehydrate itself and then got 3 more to make up for the loss, and 2 of 2 Rhode Island Red “pullets” had a gender crisis and started crowing, leaving us with 6 egg producers and 2 chronologically challenged noise makers as big as turkeys. Our (unplanned) roosters are big boys and get a little confused about pecking order thinking they can intimidate me. They get regular lessons about the advantages of opposing thumbs and higher intelligence, yet still haven’t figured out Darwinian theory. Kinda funny actually when they do their little sideways dance to give me attitude.
