It’s windy today! It has me flashing back to March when this happened:

/ Laura Thomson
a photo of a movable coop that has flipped upside down from the wind. You see the open bottom of the coop at the top. Chickens are in front of the coop scratching in the dirt. The windbreak in the middle has a broken spot and the coop is clearly not squared up any more.

The wind one night in early March took the “mobile” part of our mobile coops too seriously! Anna said I should post about it at the time, but I was too frazzled to get my thoughts together. Now hearing the wind today made me remember that I should put this up.

That day, I woke up to my aunt saying, “Laura, you’ve got some chickens loose.”

Sure enough, I walked out and the whole crew were out.

A gif that shows chickens out of the coop, the upside down coop, and chickens sitting on the inside roof of the coop which is now on the ground.
“Where are we supposed to roost?!”

We actually were incredibly lucky because most of our flock of 60+ birds survived! Sadly, we did lose one hen because something fell on her, but it is astounding to me that so many made it through fine and all stayed together.

Here’s what it looked like when we flipped it back over:

A pickture of the upside down coop with a skidsteer. The coop is propped on a log, a pallet, and the bucket of the skidsteer.
The coop is right side up again. The skidsteer shows in the picture and the chain is still attached to the coop. The roof of the coop is bent in.

We had to use Sweetiepie (that’s my name for my skidsteer) because we were worried that chickens might run back towards us and get hurt if we rolled the coop over in an uncontrolled way. (Also, it was really stinkin’ heavy and we wouldn’t have been able to physically do it anyway, but let’s ignore that part.)

Look how gorgeous that sky is in those pictures. It looked so innocent by the next day.

Anyway, the coop is a bit worse for the wear, but it’s functional. We have made a couple of changes (for example, how we attached the roost and now we put a tiedown over the top that connects to two of those metal things that screw down into the ground for a little extra peace of mind).

Never underestimate the power of the wind on the prairie!