Dog days of summer

"Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirt and gritty.  Been down, isn't it a pity, doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city."

The year that I was born, 1966, Lovin' Spoonful hit #1 on the charts with that summer-related song.  We are feeling the oppressive heat and so are our animals.  Prior to butchering our meat birds, we actually lost a few due to the heat.  Those birds are so big and heavy that the heat is unbearable.  As far as the laying hens, they stay in the shade in the barn during the heat of the day.  When they venture out to scratch, they hold their wings out a tad.  I guess having all those feathers makes them hot.  I tried to get a picture of the way they hold their wings to show you, but by the time I got home from work at 6:30, they weren't quite as hot.

Due to the excessive heat, egg production has plummeted.  In the Spring, we were picking up over 3 dozen a day.  This month so far, we had a low day of only 14 eggs and a high day of 24 eggs.



C'mon girls.  Lay!

I tend to get impatient and want them to lay more, but really, this is normal in nature.  If you think about it, animals in nature generally reproduce in the Spring and early Summer when there is plenty of food and conditions are more favorable to their offspring surviving.  In 'factory farming,' humans have place animals in environments and breeding that yield year-round production.  In nature this simply isn't the case with most breeds.  Hens feel the stress of the high heat and slow way down in egg production. 

During these scalding summer days, I make sure they have plenty of fresh water to drink, plenty of shade and will throw them weeds and grass from the garden to snack on just to make the old girls happy.  After we finished a big watermelon, we threw the entire watermelon rind for them to eat.  They seemed to really enjoy it and ate it down to the skin!



Freshly pulled weeds for the birds

Chickens are very entertaining to watch.  Sometimes I think they are not too smart, but other times they display intelligent behaviour, especially in the summer.  They position themselves between our big barn and our goat barn.  This area is completely shaded and there is a slight breeze that blows through the 'breezeway' creating a perfect place to slumber and take a nice dust bath on these long July days.



She's not a little red hen, but this picture begs to be captioned, "Who will help me make this flour into bread?"

So in the early mornings and late afternoons the hens are out foraging on bugs & worms and scratching through freshly 'deposited' cow patties for tasty morsels.  Other than that, they're laid up.  I guess you could say they've got it made in the shade (but there's eggs to be laid!!)