Pigs Need Nests, Too

I’m not coming out. It’s too cold.

Around here, it was REALLY COLD for over a week.  Like sub-zero and single digits at night, warming up to the teens and low twenties in the daytime.

For some people in other regions of the country, this is not that cold.  I probably seem like a wimp to them. Well, I AM a wimp.  I grew up in Texas.  I had no idea what cold was until I moved to Colorado.

I have a love/hate relationship with this kind of bone-chilling cold.  As in, I love to hate it.  I enjoy complaining about it. Don’t even get me started if the wind is blowing, too – the whine meter goes off the charts.  It’s not one of my more attractive qualities.

Before I had animals, I only had friends to commiserate with.  Now, I’ve got Doink.

Pigs don’t have fur.  They only have hair, like us.  So pigs can’t brave the cold like say, a goat can.  Doink sleeps in the goat shed with Brandy the goat and four of the hens (more on their weirdness later.) The shed has a big sliding, barn-style door and in that door we cut a “dog door”.  Brandy does NOT like being shut up at night and will often choose to stay outside in a protected area.  So I close the big door at night, leaving the small one open so she can come in if she chooses.  But this cold forced her inside early every evening. I would sneak out before I went to bed and quietly close the dog door to keep the heat in the shed.  She would always have pushed it back open sometime during the night and in the morning I would find her sitting with her head sticking out the door, waiting patiently for breakfast to be served. (It, so far, has been impossible to get a photo of this – she leaps up the moment she hears our back door open.)

Doink has an elaborate “nest” building routine every night.  He has some blankets in amongst the straw and he moves it all around, building it up so his big ol’ body is directly under the heat lamp, surrounded by the bedding.  He is surprisingly effective at this, using his silly little hooves and his big snout to move practically every piece of straw so that it’s in just the right place.  When it started getting cold, this is what I would find when I checked on the animals in the evening.  The hens, princesses Jasmine, Belle and Rapunzel hadn’t learned to roost yet and would tuck in behind Doink every night.

Nice and comfy, with a few hens tucked in for extra warmth.

However, this is how I found him most nights of this past week’s intense nighttime cold.

Yes, there’s a large pig in there somewhere.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty impressive.  Brandy snuggles up against the edge of his mound of straw (again no pictures – she’s like a jack-in-the-box when she hears me) and seemingly watches over him and the hens throughout the night.

We should all be so lucky.

(Sharing at Farm Fun Friday, Clever Chicks Blog Hop, Backyard Farming Connection Hop, Down Home Blog Hop, The HomeAcre Hop, Farm Girl Friday and TALU Tuesday!)