How do you prepare for storms and natural disasters?

Jay Angler wrote:

Donna Lynn wrote: But with turkeys and chickens who are not easy to catch during daylight; and dogs and new cats who don't all get along well together yet, we really don't have a good current plan to evacuate all of us quickly and safely.  

I have read that animals are incredibly good at getting  to safety if you let them free to do so. You might not get them back after, but at least they'd have a fighting chance if there is an unexpected immediate evacuation order.

My Muscovy ducks only get access to chicken feed at bedtime. Food is a great motivator for them. It wouldn't be exactly easy to corral them at an unexpected time, but if you can find something the chickens and turkeys consider a "treat" and mostly save it for emergencies, that would qualify as "preparedness"! You still would require sufficient portable infrastructure to actually evacuate them. We have a lot of dog crates we've mostly been given, but I still don't think there's enough of them to seriously evacuate all our animals. This is certainly something we need to ponder.

Yes, we would free them if we could not take them with us.  They are used to foraging and enjoy it.  But I would worry that they would try to come back to their roosts at night.  Obviously not if there was a fire or a flood, but with a chemical spill they might not realize the danger until it was too late, like the many dead animals that have been reported in the woods around East Palestine, Ohio.

I do give our chickens and turkeys fresh blueberries once in awhile, and that is unanimously their favorite treat.  They follow me around to get them, and just yesterday one pullet darted around me to cut me off and tried to herd me back to the layers' area as I walked away toward the turkeys' yard to give them the rest of the berries XD.  However I'm not sure I could get them to go into our large dog crate and stay there while the rest meandered in.  I'd have to have a really big bowl of blueberries!  Maybe I should see how they like them frozen.  And like you, we don't have enough containment for all the critters.  I could put our breeding pair of turkeys in the dog crate, but the chickens would need something much larger.  Perhaps our smaller coop (a rickety Rural King kit we bought years ago for our first chicks) could fit inside our small open trailer, but even tied down, its safety at highway speeds would be questionable.  Plus it would be difficult for us to lift it into the trailer and would take precious time to disassemble and reassemble.  They could all fit inside it, but would not be comfortable like they are now.  In an emergency we might try it though.  The tractor bucket could be fitted with straps to lift it, although it is made of such flimsy wood pieces that it could break apart under its own weight if not supported just right.  I could reinforce it with 2x4s, but that would add weight.  The right way to do it would be an actual evacuation drill, but that just sounds like a lot of work, LOL!  Maybe in the spring, after the new pullets are fully integrated with the other layers in the larger coop, we can play around with the little coop, see how hard it is to lift by hand, try lifting it with straps, etc.  If I really get ambitious, I could design a new small coop that is sturdier AND can easily be partially disassembled to allow us to quickly reassemble it inside the trailer on short notice.  I could size it to fit perfectly and have windbreak panels all ready to latch into place.  (Now I'm going to be dreaming about designs for that...)

Glad to see you're thinking about it! We used to have a special box that fit on our small trailer, but it died of rot in our wet climate. I have one portable shelter that would fit, but as with you, it wouldn't take near enough of our flock, nor would it be up to our usual standard of comfort. At best, I would be getting my friends to put out requests on facebook etc for people able to house some of them temporarily, far enough away from the problem for them to be safe. We are so used to *not* asking for help, we forget that many strangers will help in emergencies, particularly when innocent animals are involved.

Yes, chemical contamination is a nasty one, as animals have instincts for coping with natural disasters, but not necessarily human ones. However, if the birds will die where they currently are, any effort you make is better than that.

One thing we do have is a roll of electronet fencing that has rarely been used. That might be useful if we have to evacuate and can find any farmer along the way with a field they'd like "fertilized and mown". We have been know to refer to some of our ducks as the "Front Lawn Fertilization Committee"!

Alas, my biggest risk is a large earthquake. Our chicken houses may well cope better with that than the house we live in. Good thing we have plenty of tarps and camping equipment.

On the subject of animal evacuation, I do think a trailer is a good thing. I give full credit to the Rainey's tv show "Homestead Rescue" for this idea.

In one of their episodes they built a mobile barn on a trailer. A chicken coop and goat pen if I recall. But that is where the animals lived. All they had to do was back up the truck, hitch, and drive off. They were preparing for wildfires... but the same method could be used in many situations. It wouldn't work for everyone, but a 20ft trailer can fit quit a few animals, especially poultry. The key is to already have the housing on the trailer with the animals used to going into it.