Country Life: Caring for Chickens in the Snow

Over the last week we have had two snowstorms here in Central Virginia. Not only has it been snowy, it has been extremely cold. On Friday, the temperature dropped to -3 degrees. With temperatures that low, it makes it challenging to care for outdoor animals. Not only do we have to worry about keeping the animals warm, it is hard to keep their water buckets from freezing.

Fortunately, chickens are very hardy animals. They can withstand extreme temperatures as long as they have shelter. we have our main coop and a mobile coop since we have two roosters. The chickens we were most concerned with were the two in the mobile coop. There is a lot less protection from the elements in the mobile coop. Therefore, we hooked up a heat lamp for the chickens. We put the heat lamp near where they roost at night. The lamp provided enough heat through the night to prevent them from freezing.

For the chickens in the main coop, we boarded up the windows so the wind and snow do not blow in. Plus they having wood shavings to nest in. Chickens also huddle together to heat each other!

The hardest part was keeping with the water buckets. Of course there are heated water bowls available. However, we didn’t want to spend the money on these bowls when we normally don’t have this severe cold weather. The other trick we tried was placing ping pong balls in the water bowls. The idea is that the balls will stir up the water making it harder for it to freeze. Of course with negative temperatures, there was no preventing the freezing! We just had to deal with going out to the coop each morning dumping ice and adding water.

Our chickens do not like walking in the snow. This means we had to shovel out part of their yard in the coop. Thinking about it, it must be uncomfortable for their bare feet to be standing in the snow!

For more about raising chickens, checkout my previous chicken posts.

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Renae Chiovaro

Renae is a married working mom of two handsome boys. She works as a registered dental hygienist by day and blogs here at How to Have it All by night. She enjoys cooking from scratch, working in her vegetable garden and functional training.