Snow Coop - February Snow Falls

While we had some bitter cold weather in December, January was basically dry and warm in our area. The majority of the month of January was almost balmy with even a few "drought" fires in the area. There was only 50% of our usual snowpack on Mt. Hood. Such strange weather this winter for all the Pacific Coast regions. Then February changed all that, at least for the PacNW.  While we really are not getting a lot of precipitation, we are getting a lot of dry snow and bitter cold temps (for our region) with highs during the days in the 20s. Today is day three of our snow/storm. The chicklets are still laying eggs.  The day before the snow was simply bitter cold temps on Wednesday (29F with 35-40mph wind gusts), and the ladies only produced one egg between the four of them. Thursday, the East winds started howling and the snow started falling (or should I say flying). With every surface fully frozen outside, the snow was having a hard time sticking to anything and every gust of wind whipped the snow even farther, probably miles away, from its original land fall point.

The gals were not happy with the snow event. Their pen full of snow was not their idea of a fun place to be. We put up some ply-wood on the east and north side of the pen to at least protect them from the wind chill, which, by the way, in our area, was dropping the already freezing air temps to well below zero. On Friday, I added an extra layer of plastic on the south side of their pen to try to cut down on the amount of cold air draft from blowing in to their pen and under their coop.

We have a heavy military type water-proof canvas, fastened with bungee cords, wrapped over their coop to help insulate and protect them inside. We have a 75watt red (reptile) lamp in their coop for warmth. This strategy seems to be working.  We had three eggs on Thursday and four eggs on Friday.

This photo was taken Saturday morning. Without the drifts factored in, we have about five inches of snow on the ground. The wind is blowing snow from the east as you can see bits of snow blur by the nesting box in the top picture. The top picture is the zoomed in version of the original photo below it.

Snow coop Feb 8, 2014

Day	High	Low	Avg Low
4	36F	28F	35F
5	29	22	35
6	24	19	35
7	26	19	35
8	27	20	35
9	35	25	35
10	36	26	35
11	49	43	39