Chicken Frostbite — Randy's Chicken Blog

The polar vortex is a mass of super-cold, low-pressure air that is parked over the area around the north pole. During winter the polar vortex expands and every few years it manages to break through to the south and engulf large areas with frigid arctic air. When a polar vortex event happens, if you have chickens, you’d better gear up, because suddenly you’re not dealing with normal winter conditions—it’s like you just moved your chickens to the North Pole. Keep in mind that chickens were domesticated from jungle fowl—tropical animals. If you were to parachute a tropical animal, say a lion or a hippo, into the polar regions, you know they would not survive. It’s cold up there! Have you ever wondered why Santa doesn’t have chickens pulling his sleigh? Obviously, it’s because chickens just don’t do well in the arctic! So, when the arctic moves to your coop, you’ll be dealing with temperatures that are waaay colder than typical winter temps, and you need to react!

This is not one of those blog posts that outlines all the steps you need to take to winterize your coop and prepare your chickens for cold weather. I’ve written about that before right here. Nor does it give detailed information on preventing and treating frostbite in your chickens. You can find excellent information on that very topic at Minnesota’s own VJP Poultry blog, and from the Chicken Chick. This post is simply the story of the polar vortex event that the Hipster Hens and I lived through last week, and how we coped.

My first realization that we were about to be invaded by frigidly cold air was on Sunday of last week when I checked the weather app on my phone – I was checking out Monday’s predicted snow event and was totally unaware of the polar vortex. But that’s when I noticed the numbers “-7” and “-12” for Tuesday and Wednesday. And those weren’t the lows—they were the highs! The predicted lows for those days were -26 and -31! We’ve seen those kinds of temperatures before in the Twin Cities, but we see them rarely enough that we remember them. The last time, for instance, that we had this kind of cold was back in January of 2014, and before that you have to go all the way back to 2004.

I belong to several Facebook groups for chicken keepers, and as the cold air mass approached and finally hit, all the discussion was about the dangerous cold. There is a huge divide in the chicken-keeping community between those who believe you should provide a heat source in the winter and those who maintain that it isn’t necessary and perhaps even bad. As the temperature dropped, the debate intensified. Some who were new to chicken keeping and perhaps had a few hens in one of those cute but insubstantial manufactured coops in their backyard, were panicking. Many pulled their hens out of those substandard coops and brought them into their basements and garages—I saw reports of chickens cooped up in a tent in a garage, and at least one case of chickens free-ranging in a bathroom. The “no-heat” community maintained that as long as the coop is adequately ventilated to allow moisture to escape, and as long as wattles and combs are protected with a layer of Vaseline (or an organic wax product for those who are aghast at the thought of putting a petroleum product on their hens), then the flock would do just fine. The “use-heat” contingent argued about the best heat source – some old-timers maintained that a few heat lamps would do the trick, while the large majority maintained that heat lamps were dangerous fire-starters and could result in the loss of the coop and the entire flock. Many suggested ceramic heat panels, Sweeter Heaters, and oil-filled electric radiators.

It would be very interesting to see a survey where flock-keepers outline how they prepared and how their chickens fared. Because in the aftermath, the reports of the consequences were all over the map. There were reports of multiple chickens freezing to death. There were reports that every chicken in some flocks had severely frostbitten combs, or feet, or both. There were reports of only a few chickens with a little frostbite. And there were reports of the entire flock being just fine. Those varied reports seemed to have no connection to the presence or absence of heat in the coop—and that defies logic. Either there’s a good deal of misreporting, or I’m missing some crucial piece of information. The reaction of flock-keepers ranged from deep despair at some superficial frostbite to a feeling of having dodged the bullet because “only a few hens died.” And there was even one cavalier person who commented that since several hens had their combs freeze off, they would be fine next winter since they no longer had combs to freeze.

It snowed on Monday—about a half a foot. When the snow stopped, the temperature started to drop. Sometime in the early morning hours of Tuesday it reached ten below zero, and that’s where it bottomed out. The sun came up in a cloudless sky, and the temperature started to warm, which is what you expect to happen in the morning. But Tuesday morning was not a typical morning. When the temperature reached seven below zero, it started to fall again. By 4 PM it had reached 15 below and the nestbox thermometer in the big coop was reading 14 degrees. The hens were all muttering something about how the hatchery could have sold them to somebody in Miami Beach, but no! They’d wound up in this ice-block of a coop on the godforsaken tundra. So, I had to give them a pep talk and remind them that the coop is covered in 1.5 inches of foam insulation, has a couple ceramic heat panels, and was nearly 30 degrees warmer than the outside temperature. I’d just done some remodeling last summer to fill cracks that would let in drafts and to improve the ventilation at the top of the coop to allow moisture to escape. And I topped my pep talk with the fact that every chicken is covered in a warm coat of feathers and down. Were they buying my rationale? Well, they laid a few eggs, so I took that as a good sign. But I was worried—the temperature was supposed to drop another 20 degrees overnight. Finally, I pulled a couple of oil-filled electric space heaters out of the basement, installed them in the coop, ran extension cords, and said a little prayer to the gods of circuit breakers. Then I went to bed, but didn’t sleep, and every few hours I trudged down the hill to the coops—and the temperature in the coop was lower at every visit.

The early morning temperature bottomed out at -30 on Wednesday. In the big coop it was 4.6 degrees—that was with the ceramic heaters working full time and the addition of the 600-watt space heater. The chickens looked cold and disgruntled. I saw no obvious signs of frostbite, but it had already happened. It just didn’t become obvious until the blisters started forming on their combs, and the dead tissue started turning black.

When I went into the big coop after lunch, it looked like a crime scene – blood was smeared everywhere and it was all coming from Marissa, one of my pretty Cream Legbar hens. The top part of her comb was necrotic and black, and blood was oozing from the margin between the living and dead tissue. There were blisters on the combs of the other two Legbars, and also on the combs of both roosters. The chickens with big combs had frozen them—no surprise. To make the situation worse, the Legbars are on the low end of the pecking order, so were kept furthest from the heaters by the other chickens. I gathered up Marissa, carefully cleaned off the blood, and moved her to a crate in the basement. Thus, she missed the second cold night in the coop. It was actually slightly warmer Wednesday night and the coop temperature never dipped below a balmy 15 degrees.

Marissa spent two days in the basement crate, obviously in pain, standing in one spot, staring at nothing, not eating or drinking. The weather moderated on Friday and I moved her out of the basement. Standard advice for frostbite is to stay warm until it's healed, but she would have died in the house—the only fluids she got were those I forced down with a syringe and she did not eat at all. So, I put her in a small pen in the pole barn, by herself but next to the big coop. She spent the day walking back and forth along the fence—she badly wanted to be back in the coop, and she managed to scrape her mangled comb against the fence so it started to bleed all over again. She’ll eventually go back into the coop, but we need to proceed with baby steps. Not only is she a low-ranking hen, but when she goes back, she'll be “the new kid” and will be subjected to hazing. And her comb is sloughing necrotic tissue and covered in scabs—a perfect target for malicious pecking. So, baby steps. Today, I moved Marissa's two best friends, the other two Legbars, into the pen with her. I scattered some mealworms and scratch on the floor and they all pecked it up. All of them! Marissa was nonchalantly eating. Then she got a drink, and they all settled down on their roost. Simply allowing her to convalesce with some friends was all I needed to do to calm her down and get her to eat and drink. More good news: As tissue sloughs off Marissa’s comb, I can see healthy tissue underneath. While she'll lose the surface skin and have scars, it appears that she's not going to lose her whole comb.

Meanwhile, the forecast shows negative temperatures again next Thursday and Friday. The polar vortex is bouncing back. Winter is not over.