Yesterday it was hot. The hottest day in recorded history, in fact — at 109° F, we broke the previous record of 108°, which was set… two days ago. (Until this week, the record of 102° had held since the early ‘80s.) Humidity was low, thankfully, and I recently made a few upgrades in anticipation of the heat wave that worked out pretty nicely. But before I get into all that, a little more background:

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, or as we like to call it, the PNW, which can be pronounced either pinwuh or p’new, but NEVER pee-now, it doesn’t get hot very often. Yesterday will likely have been the hottest day of the year, although there’s no guarantee of that. Most days this time of year, like today, it’s in the high 60s and low 70s — very comfortable for man and beast. (And for woman, non-binary person, child, fish, and fowl. My sincerest apologies to anyone I forgot. Insect, mollusk, crustacean … Wait, is a bat a beast if it flies? It’s not a fowl, but I’m not sure if all non-human mammals are beasts. That seems pretty arbitrary. What about whales? I could see a whale being a sea-beast more than a bat being a sky-beast, because I think of a beast as a mammal over a certain size, but I don’t know if that’s correct. Merriam-Webster gives multiple definitions, none of which specifically mentions mammals, but I’m still pretty sure a bird is not a beast, so I don’t know. Regardless, we all stay pretty comfortable.)

So when there is a heat wave, I have to take some precautions that I don’t normally have to worry about, but it’s good practice for the future, when I will hopefully be living someplace a bit warmer. If I don’t prepare, I’ll be very uncomfortable and I’ll lose animals.

For me, having a good air conditioner is more than enough. A few weeks ago I got a nice GE portable AC with 12,000 BTUs of cooling power, and it kept my RV tolerable. If I’d stayed inside all day and never opened the door, I could have kept it a steady 68° in here, but since I went out to check on the animals throughout the day, that didn’t happen. This is the first summer that I’ve had a decent air conditioner, in my entire life, really, so in the past I’ve had to make do with opening doors and windows and running fans, or one of those little desktop evaporative coolers. It’s been fine, but this is better.

It’s so unusual for it to be hot here that I’ve had a hard time keeping the air conditioners in my vehicles working, because when they have problems, none of the local mechanics know how to fix them, and it’s usually not hot enough for them to tell if the AC is really cooling the air or if it’s just cold outside. Pretty annoying when your mechanic assures you your AC is working and you later find yourself driving in Florida, taking a hot blast to the face.

Still, at the end of the day, as a human being, I can figure out a way to cool down, whether it’s buying an air conditioner or sitting in a tub of water, or going to the grocery store or the beach, or wherever. For my animals, it’s a little trickier, because they’re stuck here and they don’t have Amazon accounts.

I do not have big industrial air conditioners for my barn. I’ve seen those in action and they’re pretty nice, but they’re expensive, especially when I’d only use them five or ten days a year. What I do instead is turn the whole building into its own air conditioner, in a way. I have a sprinkler mounted at the peak of my roof, which I run on hot days. The water conducts the heat from the roof and transports it off of the building, and some of it also evaporates, creating a cooling reaction. This would be a problem in a drought-stricken area, but here in the rainy p’new it’s not a problem, and when I finish writing this I’m going to invent a system that recycles the water. So it’s 20, even 30° cooler inside my barn than it is outside, as evidenced by the very comfortable animals hanging out inside. In fact, I did not top off anyone’s water during the three-day heat wave — they were no thirstier than usual and the water buckets stayed full.

For those animals that still chose to be outside, there’s a pond, trees for shade, and of course the water running off the roof. Everyone was fine except for my pig. She doesn’t have pond access, because she likes to strip the bark off the trees in that part of the yard, and because the chickens like to peck her butthole when she’s pooping, which, understandably, she hates. Plus it’s gross and sometimes draws blood — the first time I saw that happen I removed her from the chicken yard immediately. Poor girl. So I keep her in her own pen now, where, because it doesn’t get hot very often, she has not bothered to dig a mud wallow since last summer, and where her water trough isn’t big enough for her to submerge herself in enough to stay cool. (She is a teacup micropig that was allowed to eat freely her whole life, so she grew about 300 pounds larger than teacup micropigs are supposed to. Or, more accurately, she reached full size because she wasn’t starved in order to stunt her growth.) A few days ago when the heat wave started, she struggled, and I tried to dig out her wallow and keep her wet. I hung a big fan in her pen and did everything I could, but she was panting and showing signs of significant heat stress. When it cooled down enough that I felt I could do it safely, I moved her inside, where it was 20 to 30° cooler. She didn’t show any more signs of stress and she didn’t drink excessively, so this seems to be a good option for her until we can move someplace where she has her own pond and a better wallow — in addition to everything else, the soil here isn’t very good for making mud.

As for the birds, they all have access to plenty of water and shade, and some of them seem very much at home in the heat. The ducks were all fine. The geese took advantage of the shade or just went inside. The turkeys showed the most signs of heat stress, panting heavily and staying in the shade, standing in the water or under the mister; since turkeys are native to some very hot parts of the country, I wasn’t too worried, but I watched them closely.

Some of the chickens were panting quite a bit, but not to a degree that worried me. And then there was my little Egyptian Fayoumi hen, running around like it was just another day in the barnyard. The Sicilian buttercups seemed pretty unfazed as well. Most of the Mediterranean breeds do well with the heat, but that’s especially true of the smaller breeds. My Marans, barred Rocks, and Easter eggers aren’t quite as tough, but they were fine. And then there were the pigeons, most of whom weren’t even breathing heavily. The same was true of the Guinea fowl.

One interesting thing about birds and hot weather is that they will not eat corn when it’s hot out. This is because corn generates more heat during digestion than some other grains; that’s very useful in the winter, but a problem in the summer. Even the hundred-or-so wild band-tailed pigeons that come to my yard all summer to gorge on corn stopped showing up the last few days; I expect to see them again now that it has cooled back down. When it got hot, I fed mainly wheat, and supplemented with fresh greens.

From my research and my experience, I’ve determined various ways to keep my birds and other animals cool in the tropics, so I’ll share a few of them here:

1) Do the obvious things, like providing lots of water and shade. Chickens and turkeys like to stand in shallow water to cool off, so it’s important to make that available to them. Misters or sprinklers are helpful, too.

2) Have lots of fresh forage available. Green grass is a better hot weather feed than dried grains, one reason being that it has a lot of moisture in it. If grazing isn’t an option, fresh vegetables or silage/haylage may be the next best thing for most animals (but not for horses).

3) Build barns out of unfired clay materials like earth blocks, rammed earth, or cob. The beauty of these materials is in their ability to regulate the temperatures of indoor spaces; for one, they have a lot of thermal mass, so they maintain a steady temperature better than other building materials, but they also absorb moisture from the air when it’s cold and release it when it’s hot, cooling the indoor space. And they ‘breathe’, so there is air exchange and air filtration occurring, even in unventilated spaces. If you’re not familiar with these materials, it’s time to start googling, or consider enrolling yourself in a workshop. Let me put it this way: I’m a woodworker and I know how to build high quality houses and other structures out of wood, using other conventional materials to insulate and finish the structure. I can make the building energy efficient and comfortable. I just can’t make it as energy efficient or as comfortable or as healthful as an earth building.

Something I’d like to do when I have the space and the right climate for it is to test various building materials against the heat. To do this I would build several structures with identical shapes, dimensions, and orientation, spaced at regular intervals, and I would monitor the temperatures inside them. My hypothesis is that an earth block structure stuccoed with a lime plaster will perform the best, staying the coolest on hot days. Steel structures will likely be the worst performers, but boy are they cheap and easy to build. I’ll also test green roofs, which I expect to improve the buildings’ performance even more.

Setting aside design and management considerations, perhaps the most obvious way to beat the heat is to start with heat-hardy animals, whether that means picking breeds from hot places, or selectively breeding your own stock for heat tolerance. In past years, I’ve lost some birds to hot weather, but yesterday was the hottest day in our history, the third day of a record-breaking heat wave, and I didn’t lose a single animal. I attribute this to my breeding program, and in the case of chickens, by preference for flighty, hot weather birds from the Mediterranean, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. I have a few puffballs in my flock, but they’re not my usual cup o’ tea — I get them on occasion for specific genes I want to breed into my other birds.

Another tactic is to raise local landrace breeds, if you have such a thing where you live. A landrace is a breed that was not developed through selective breeding, but rather, was allowed to develop on its own via natural selection, with minimal intervention. Some landraces, like the Texas longhorn, went through an extended feral period where they simply lived as wild animals; other breeds remained in captivity, but were allowed to breed freely. Landraces are ideally suited to the environments in which they developed, and they tend to be highly disease and parasite-resistant. Of course, not every area has its own landrace livestock, but there’s usually a local favorite; it’s worth talking to area farmers and ranchers and asking them what they raise and why.

What’s your favorite heat-hardy livestock or poultry breed? Tell me in the comments. (Comments are disabled.)