Wet day

It has been decidedly moist* here today. I realise people further north/in Scotland have it much worse than us but it’s still very wet and windy.

The beck at the bottom of our garden is usually just a pleasant trickle amongst the many rocks – 2.5m/8ft wide but no more than 15cm/6ins deep for the most part (there are some deeper pools and Lily-dog knows the location of every single one). There are enough protruding stones that we can step over it in trainers without getting our shoes wet. Not today though.

It’s fast and dirty – the run off from woodland, farmland, golf courses and roadways – and when the wind drops, we can hear it roaring from the house. We’ve seen it a foot higher than this, right to the edge of the far bank, but this is busy enough.

(As a comparison this is what it looked like this time last year, just after the first load of snow. Much calmer and clearer. A few days after that photo was taken, the top couple of inches of the whole beck froze solid enough that I could just about walk on it.)

The chickens have also been complaining loudly to me about the weather of late. I asked on Twitter earlier if anyone knew if you could get snorkels for chickens but I think actually wellies and/or waders might be more appropriate: it’s very muddy in there.

I’ve given them another piece of old trellis to stand on today, meaning that more than half their run is covered with pallets/trellises or is covered with some sort of actual shelter so they aren’t in the mud all the time. (They can go into the coop too, but they don’t tend to use it much during the day except to lay, I guess they’re spending enough time in there during these long nights.)

If this rain keeps up, I think I might have to add more trellises but when the rain does stop, they still do like scratching around in the better draining bit – there was one of those holes that looks like it was going through to China in one of the dry-ish bits of the run.

As wet as it is at the moment, I think they prefer it to the frozen world last year because they couldn’t scratch in that, and they do love scratching and digging.

Another good bit of chicken news – yesterday morning my new joint-favourite chicken Blue was looking very sorry for herself: tail down, head low, not even willing to eat seed from my hand. I couldn’t see anything obvious protruding or stuck, and her crop felt ok and her comb was still as red and proud as ever , so I popped back into the coop, hoping the equivalent of a day of bed rest would help her out. Today she was running around outside with the others and circling me saying “seed! seed! seed!” so I think she’s feeling better ;) I think she might be starting to go into moult and was just feeling a bit rubbish as a result. Why couldn’t she have moulted when the weather was a bit better? Tsk, don’t they look at the long-range forecast?

If you’ve got chickens or other outside birds/animals, how are they doing in this wet weather? And anyone with a dog, did your hound get as delightfully muddy as Lily did on her walk today? ;)

(Katherine: apologies if you’re reading this. I know you don’t like it when I use the word moist. Moiiist.)

Other posts you might like:

Chickens and dogs & cats Lime the Chicken’s badly timed winter moult Our long weekend Like clean sheets on a bed