We knew it was coming. We expected it. Last night we watched the weather report. We like to make fun of how weather forecasters miss it, but they nailed this one. We woke up at 6 AM and were having coffee when we checked the weather. Fierce storms had just gone through Lake Charles heading east (toward us) with a massive front line with damaging straight line winds.
We put down our coffee and got outside with the quickness. I'll show you the bad news first. It's not really bad, just unfortunate. We were blessed. We lost a medium-sized pecan tree in the pasture. It blew across the fence that separates us and our neighbor to the east.
The pecan tree broke off a Chinese tallow tree on the fence line before going down. This might look sad and unfortunate to you. It is. But what it really looks like is a lot of work! We'll have to get this all cleaned up.
With that out of the way, let's rewind and I'll show you where Tricia and I hunkered down as the storm passed over. It was IN the chicken tractor. When we put our coffee down and got outside, our first thoughts went to our Cornish Cross meat birds. They are two weeks old. The chicken tractor is staked down, but rain water quickly saturates the ground. If straightline winds are strong enough, it'll pull the stakes right out of the ground and flip the tractor over.
In the midst of the thunder, lightning, rain and winds, this is where we were:
The tractor had a tarp over it and we were inside, trying to hold it down while the wind tried to pick it up. It turned it sideways and several times, I thought we were toast. We were praying and I had a fleeting thought that if someone's roof comes off to the west of us, we will wake up in heaven.
The birds (and us) were soaking wet. They were shaking and had their eyes closed and had hypothermia. We've got to get them warmed up but there was one big problem. The electricity, we could see, was out in the house. We loaded them in buckets and set up the brooder in the garage. Tricia began to try to warm them up by drying them off with an old t shirt.
I got our solar generator out. Fortunately it was 100% charged. We plugged in both heat lamps and the beleaguered birds began to rally.
The power stayed out for about six hours, but the solar generator did a wonderful job and we didn't lose a single bird out of the 32 in total. What a lifesaver!
In no time at all the birds destroyed the garage, pooping all over the place. I had to bleach the garage to clean up the area in the afternoon.
Somewhere around 3 PM the lights came back on. Hooray! Not only that, but the skies turned blue and the sun came out. What a change! A neighbor came by and said the winds had been clocked at 80 MPH. He laughed when I told him we rode out the storm with the chicks.
We moved them back into the chicken tractor once we were pretty sure that the storm had passed over. I think they enjoy being back out on grass. We count in a blessing that we didn't lose any birds.
In what started out to be a day on which the weather was foul, we counted our blessings, because everything turned out alright.
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