The Summer of Urgent Events

I'm starting to feel like this is a pattern. You recall the stressful first few days for our last batch of chickens? Well, the fun continued through the rest of that week and into the second week of their short lives.

On Thursday, June 21 we had a rain storm that soaked the cardboard draft shield and knocked it to the ground. I discovered this on my way out the drive, in the pouring rain. Luckily, the chickens were not suffocated under the soggy shield. They were huddled as far away from that side of the coop as possible, but all safe and sound. I cleaned up the draft shield and for good measure I took the wheels off of the coop so there should be no way they could get out. Then I hit the road and enjoyed a lovely customer appreciation dinner put on by Farm Credit, complete with an hour-long gab session with one of my college pals who I don't see often enough.

Friday afternoon I looked out the window and thought I spotted chicks outside the coop. Upon closer inspection, yes, they were definitely out. They were hopping back and forth through the plastic lattice holes, having a grand time by the looks of it. I was worried about further attacks from the crows, so I again shored up the coop (who knew it was bad enough to require shoring up not once, but four separate times in a single week!!). This time I put row cover fabric over the lattice to create a physical barrier that would let some air through, but wouldn't allow chicks to get through and hopefully would slow down air enough to prevent drafts on young chicks.

With a week's worth of modifications, the coop and the chicks got along great for exactly one week. Then the evening of June 29 we were hit by the super derecho storm that rolled through the mid-Atlantic. We had straight-line winds in the neighborhood of 65 mph.

The little square of sawdust is where the coop was, before the storm.

And here's a closer look of what happened to the coop in the storm.

Never fear, no chickens were harmed this time. Brian just happened to look out the window during the storm and see the coop crumpled up against the tree. So we rushed out and found all the chicks huddled together in the middle of the sawdust square. Amazingly they were all fine. A little damp, but basically no worse for having had their house blow clean away. We put them in the garage overnight and then spent about four hours Saturday morning rebuilding their coop. So now we're calling it chicken coop 6.1 (I really need to get the post on chicken coops we have known finished so that comment makes sense).

We fared pretty well in the storm, all things considered. We didn't lose our power, but were without water for a day and a half and had to boil water for drinking for another three days. We had a lot of trees go down, too many to count, that we will be cleaning up for months. We also lost a lot of shingles off the house and will have to replace our roof. But many people were without power for days and lost much more. We said over and over how much being without something makes you appreciate it that much more. We are very thankful for power, clean, running water, and air conditioning. We are also very grateful to Brian's parents for helping us clean up trees from the driveway on Saturday. They were here with us during the storm Friday night and drove home around midnight when it had calmed down. But they were back out on Saturday with chainsaw and bottle water in hand.

We could hear shingles popping off of the roof during the storm; it was pretty scary.

I'm not sure if this maple in the front yard was the biggest tree we lost, but it was one of the biggest to be sure. Looks like it had been struck by lightning before this storm. We are very thankful it fell away from the house. There were four trees in the driveway, two in the yard, and in the fields you can look in every direction and see multiple large branches or tree tops down.