Every year as May rolls around I get anxious about what the summer will bring for us and our chickens. As our chicken keeping time has grown longer our experiences have shaped the way we handle the hot weather. Initially our set up was a 10x13 run with a coop inside and the tarp they sent with the run over the top. The tarp was green, light green, and I thought it looked very pretty on top of the run. We were satisfied with how everything looked. It felt like things were going okay. We got our chicks in October and they didn't go out until it was slightly warming up. We started with 2 Buff Orpingtons and one Easter Egger. Our BO were adorable, personable and even mostly sweet through the feisty teenage weeks. Our EE was hell on wings most of the time. She was a brat during this same teenage weeks, we spent a lot of time sighing and rolling our eyes at her, wondering what we had done in getting her.
As time went on and the temperatures climbed we started noticing one of our girl's (Cluck Skywalker, we called her Skywalker) wings would droop and her comb was lightening, it was the beginning of heat stress and potentially a heart condition. She was always the most sensitive to heat. We looked at ways to combat it, we bought an outdoor fan, used frozen gallon water jugs and eventually bought a small evaporative cooler for them. Even with all this the heat was intense. We had the coop and run situated under trees but the ambient temperature was over 110 in the summer no matter what we did, and while things were under shade most of the time, that wasn't the case all of the time. There were parts of the day that a portion of the tarp was in the sun. The green tarp. When I would work in there it would be almost 10 degrees hotter up where my head was. At the same time we started to realize our girls would not sleep in the coop, it was just too hot even with every vent open. The evaporative cooler only cooled the ground, so the coop was stifling. The slept up on the roof every night and as mid June hit it was just so, so hot.
One morning mid-June I came out to check on everyone and let the girls out to free range and only two ran out. I figured Skywalker was in the nest box, but after a few minutes when she hadn't run out to greet me I checked. Not in the box. With dread in my heart I walked around to the other side of the coop and there she was, dead on the ground. When I checked the cameras it showed that at 9:09 pm she had simply fallen off the roof, dead or dying. I don't think I could have saved her, she was completely limp, no flapping or struggle. Everything was silent when she hit the ground. The time between her death and my finding her was probably too long to look into a necropsy and she was literally swarming with ants and flies, it was so heartbreaking. I buried her. I installed a temperature sensor at the peak of the roof of the run after that. What I found made me feel horrible. The roof was over 115 at 9pm. The girls were trying to sleep in 115 temps at night! I still don't know how the two we had left had survived as long as they did. I immediately ordered white tarps to attempt to fix the heat situation. Once they were on the temperature dropped by a lot. During the day it was hot but ambient temperature, at night it was almost 25 degrees cooler. Still hot, but maybe not deadly hot. The next step was a larger evaporative cooler. One that was tall enough to cover the roof of the coop. We found one that you could angle the slats upwards, giving the girls the best of both worlds, ground coverage and roof coverage.
After all these adjustments things were much better in the run. I used the small cooler on the side of the run to give a boost of cool air in the main run area. We got more girls eventually and definitely refined things to be even better for the girls. I placed large (18 inch) drip trays around the run for them to stand in and filled them with about an inch of water. A high pressure mister system was installed on the property and a mister stand was included along with 30 feet of tubing allowing a lot of placement flexibility. With a handy wifi timer plug it goes on and off all day in the hot season. Note that this won't work in a humid environment the same way it does in a dry one.
I have seen a lot of chatter this year about not mitigating heat for chickens. I hear that it isn't needed or that chickens can handle it. In some cases that might be true, but we buy breeds that are maybe not as heat tolerant as they could be for the environment we buy them in, or it doesn't account for any health issues any one chicken may have that might make them a lot more sensitive to heat. I'm not here to argue with anyone about frozen treats (my chickens just like them) or about whether we should or shouldn't do what we do to bring our temps down. What I do brings the temperatures down to mid 80-s or 90's. It takes it down to high temps in the north, but here it's 115 in the shade and I'll not leave my girls in weather that would easily kill me after enough time outside. My chickens should not live in conditions I can't be in for a few hours either spending time with them or caring for them. That is my stance and after one sweet girl fell off the roof at night at 115 degrees, I'm sticking to it.
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