Yuck what a fowl day

Ha ha did you get my pun in the title!?

Today was really horrible weather but the feathery ladies and the cockerel brothers needed cleaning out so, despite it  being only 3 Celsius mid afternoon and pouring with rain I set to,  to make them cleaner and more comfortable.

If we have animals we have to look after them, despite the horrible weather and our deep desire to just hide inside and drink hot tea and do crochet in front of the wood burner

Mud and water every where

So I togged up in waterproof coat, wellies and a lot of layers of clothes underneath.  As I normally am mostly impervious to the worst the weather can throw at me and wear a t shirt and jeans in the most wet and horrible weather, this will give you an idea of howreally horrible working outside was today.

After a lot of mucking out, the contents of the hen run and hen houses were added to the compost bins

 Creosote the cockerel was not impressed!

Normally I am much tidier with the bedding, but frankly in this weather I could not give a damn about spilled straw!

And the chickens were very pleased with the clean arrangements!

Doing some outside work, at last!

Today was dry, all day ! ! !  And we had sunshine ! ! ! This is the sunset we had at 4.45 ! ! !

Sorry about the excessive use of the exclaimation marks,  but for us here this is little short of miraculous - it has rained every day for months now and most days have been gloomy and dull as well.

So I took advantage of the dry weather to clean out the hen house and we finally did something about the rat "issue" which has arisen in the Mega Hen Pen (MHP).

The MHP has pallets down on the ground in two corners for the feathery laydies to stand on and keep their feet warmer. It also has a lot of wood chip down on the floor, for the girls to scratch about in. We regularly rake the chip up and replace it  ( we make a lot of wood  chip from felling trees here) and the used chippings eventually make fabulous compost .

But it has rained so much here that the ground is saturated and the wood chippings in the run are wet. Indeed there is a severe problem around here with ground water rising up, even though we are on top of a hill

Also the rats have been burrowing in to the MHP and hiding under the pallets, and although they have not done any harm, apart from forcing us to remove the food from the run at night, I do not like the idea of rats in with my hens!

So today we also removed the pallets , which were giving the nasty rats somewhere to hid under inside the run. We have dug out and filled in the tunnels and found a nest which we dealt with. I have sanitised the run with Nettex worm oocist powder ( I have just finished worming the hens, so this was due) and we have put down a thick layer of Aubiose, straw and dry leaves for the girls to rootle about in.  They seemed very pleased with their new floor coverings, it is much drier and more absorbant for them under foot and hopefully there are less places for the rats to hide under so they will not bother coming in the run again - there is no food there except during the morning when the hens are around the feeder and they keep the rats away.

The hen house is now also clean and warm and sweet smelling - I must admit I have just been adding more bedding on top so as to maintain a deep litter system over the last 3 weeks, due to illness and the appalling weather we have had, so it really was well overdue a deep clean!








Update at 9 pm tonight - Tabitha Cat brought a very large Rat inside the house - to show us - dead, fortunately and we praised her a lot as she, the most timid and smallest of the cat family has actually caught one of the nasty things :-)  The other two looked on in amazement but did not stir from their cosy beds!