this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Updoot for the samurai-knight who says: "Ni!"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Eh, you can get ceramic heat bulbs that are pretty safe.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago