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My friends and family are all worried about our chickens being outside during the winter. It's gotten pretty cold here, so it's understandable, but I'd like to put everyone's minds at ease. The chickens are doing great! Our outdoor thermometer got down to almost 0 degrees Fahrenheit a few times last week, but the birdies don't really seem to mind. When the temperature is over 20 and/or it's sunny, they wander around the yard like usual spending time in any sunny spot they find. They are even still dust bathing. When it's colder than 20 and/or it's cloudy, they tend to huddle together near the house on our porch. We keep a close eye on them to make sure they aren't acting weird or getting frostbite and so far so good! We did read online that if you let your birds acclimate to the weather as it gets colder, they will be prepared for it, so unless one of them seems sick or frostbitten, they won't get a heat lamp. Not to repeat myself, but so far so good.

On a different note, our Leghorn has taken to jumping higher and higher though. We have to clip her wing this weekend. I found her on the fence looking into my neighbor's yard this morning. I don't want her to get any ideas. The other three pretty much stick to the ground and don't go up until they go into their hen house at night.

Smile often, keep a song in your heart, and be happy with who you are.

I was going to combine the two posts today, but thought for categorization purposes, I should separate them, so here's my Chicken anecdote:

We started raising chickens in our backyard earlier this year. We built a hen house for them out of scrap wood we got for free on Craigslist and Freecycle. It took a long time to build. We started the hen house last summer, worked on it through the winter and finally finished it and got it into our backyard in May or June of this year. Last June, we attended a class to learn a little bit about keeping chickens and decided it would be fun and nice to get fresh eggs! We don't have eggs yet, but the hens are fun. We read online that we'd get eggs as early as when the hens were 5 months old, but then a friend told us her hens didn't start laying until they were a year old, so we're waiting to see when we get eggs. Our oldest hen is 24 weeks old.