birding
Welcome to /c/birding, a community for people who like birds, birdwatching and birding in general! Feel free to post your birding photos or just photos of birds you found in general, but please follow the rules as outlined below.
-
This should go without saying, but please be nice to one another. No petty insults, no bigotry, no harassment, hate speech,nothing of that sort! Depending on the severity, you'll either only get your comment removed and a warning or your comment will be removed and you will be banned from /c/birding.
-
This is a community for posting content of birds, nothing else. Please keep the posts related to birding or birds in general.
-
When posting photos or videos that you did not take, please always credit the original photographer! Link to the original post on social media as well, if there is one.
-
Absolutely no AI-generated content is allowed! I know it has become quite difficult to tell whether or not something is AI-generated or not, but please make sure that whatever you post is not AI-generated. If it is, your post will be removed. If you continously post AI-generated content, you'll be banned from /c/birding (but it's obviously okay if you post AI-generated stuff once or twice without knowing you did so).
-
Please provide rough information location, if possible. This is a more loosely-enforced rule, especially because it is sometimes not possible to provide a location. But if you post a photo you took yourself, please provide a rough location and date of the sighting.
view the rest of the comments
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.
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
Updoot for the samurai-knight who says: "Ni!"
Eh, you can get ceramic heat bulbs that are pretty safe.
True, true.