Feb
Hot and Dry Season
For the hot summer, heat index is higher than the actual temperature and raising up to 44 degrees Celsius. On this season even the air will be dry with humidity of about 35%. Sometimes the summer was even extended. Gamefowls are now on exposed to a dangerous weather. Even you think that they are in a shaded area, yes even so, they are prone to mortality with this stressful weather.
Common Illneses
The heat stress have lots of serious effects to gamefowls including the ready-to-fight gamecocks. Take note that gamefowls do not sweat and are a warm-blooded animal meaning it will be difficult for them to regulate their temperature making them a subject to heat stress. As a result of heat stress, fowl cholera, mycoplasmosis is experienced on this season, prepare medication for such illnesses.
If you have a hundred or more gamefowls in your yard you may likely experience some sudden deaths of your chickens. Heat stroke is one of the probable cause of mortality on this season. If accompanied by other unnoticed illness, gamefowls are prone to mortality and could die on this dangerous season.
Management
Ready-to-Fights on the Keep
You may see some of the conditioned gamecocks are not performing at their best because of this harmful season. Manage your ready-to-fight gamecocks very well so they will perform at their highest performance on fight day. Minimize the stress factors, especially on the pointing period (last 3 days).
On fight day, just because the weather is hot you might wanna give them lots of water, do the normal moisture regulation but manage the heat index pretty well. If you don’t have an airconditioned cockhouse put lots of fresh banana leaves around the cockhouse and change it every day. Remember to put the leaves away in the night, plants may release carbon dioxide in the night rather than helping to absorb carbon dioxide and give oxygen.
All Gamefowls
Give them water available for the whole day and keep the water in the shaded part of the teepees. You can add electrolytes to their water to help them with this season. You can see that some farms cut the water after each meals, this is a big no-no for this season. That water could be the difference of life and death for some chicken on this dangerous season.
And make sure that they have a healthy diet. Vitamins and minerals makes their biological systems work, if there are some deficiency in them chickens will have a difficulty coping up with this hot season.
The Farm Environment
Make those trees, plants and grass green. If you don’t have enough trees it is planting time when comes rainy season.
Water the plants, grass and trees as much as they need to make them green. Grasses makes the heat index very low compared to those that don’t have grass in the area.
Trees have great effect on lowering the heat index. It gives shades and absorb the radiating heat. You might wanna put enough trees to the farm (partially shaded), but not making the farm an overly shaded surrounding.
If your cord area don’t have enough trees don’t use those wheel teepees and concrete ones. Thou they maybe durable but certainly give problems if accumulates heat. For the wheel teepees if exposed to the sun for a while, go under it and smell the air beneath. If you could smell something like a rubber burning it is indeed are exposed to the sun for a while, but if you don’t smell such odor it’s fine.
And for those concrete ones if you don’t have enough trees, it really helps on destroying the feathers. It makes the feathers deteriorate prematurely and feathers do affect the performance of gamecocks
