Eastern Montana Shatters Heat Records

Tayler Scherr didn’t head into the weekend expecting to clear out her home office. But when a surprise batch of freshly hatched chicks scampered across her path the morning of July 10, everything changed.  

Scherr raises dozens of chickens and a handful of ducks on her ranch outside Glendive in eastern Montana. The flock includes roosters roaming freely among the hens, so chicks are bound to happen. It’s just that these three hatched later in the summer than she would have liked. 

“I decided they were outlaws for showing up here on the hottest weekend we’ve had. So I named them to reflect that,” said Scherr, explaining the name choices for her trio of nefarious puffballs: Thelma, Louise and Bonnie. 

Their arrival coincided with a heat event that caused record-shattering high temperatures across southeastern Montana. Places like Glendive, Billings and Miles City hit 115 degrees on Sunday, July 12. That’s only 2 degrees cooler than Death Valley, often the hottest place on Earth, reached that same day.  

“Walking outside was about equivalent to walking into an oven,” Scherr said. “The wind was blowing quite a bit, but not once was it refreshing.”

Chicks need warmth to survive, and are often placed under heat lamps for their first several weeks of life. Scherr never had to worry about them being too warm before, but as the mercury climbed, the tiny black chicks grew listless. Bonnie was especially hard hit, and began to wilt, like a plant without water. “She was just falling over,” Scherr said. 

They needed air conditioning, and she brought the trio inside. Over the next several days, Scherr’s home office was converted into a chick intensive care unit. She fed the heat-stressed birds with droppers full of egg yolks, water and sugar to revive them. But the damage had already been done, and Bonnie didn’t make it. “That’s the problem with bringing them inside,” she said. “You get attached.”

The temperatures started to drop off after Sunday, but not by much. “It’s a sad day when 100 degrees feels like a break,” Scherr said.

Heat events like this are becoming more common as part of a changing climate, says researcher Kyle Bocinsky, director of climate extension for the Montana Climate Office. “The cognitive dissonance of climate change [is] that an event like this can be record-breaking and increasingly common,” Bocinsky said. “Humans are not evolved to deal with that.” 

And it’s not just humans. Livestock, poultry and native wildlife all suffer when temperatures skyrocket. Earlier this summer, 2.5 million chickens in France died from exhaustion and suffocation when temperatures hit 105 F. 

Because of the state’s latitude, Montanans are less equipped to deal with extreme heat. Only 70% of homes in the Treasure State have air conditioning, according to the Energy Institute at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. That’s one of the lowest rates for any state in the country; the nationwide average is 90%. Scherr just bought her first window AC unit for the ranch a couple of years ago, as summers got hotter. 

Given the state’s historically milder summers and predominantly rural population, Montana lacks the infrastructure to handle heatwaves compared to places like Arizona or Texas. “We’re all scrambling to figure out what this looks like in our communities,” Bocinsky said. “An event like 115-degree temperatures in Montana, those are always going to be rare, but what we know is that they are less rare today than they were 30 years ago.”

The Climate Office runs an extensive network of weather stations and drought monitors across the state, and helps prepare a weekly drought report for the Governor’s Office. Bocinsky says this recent event will also exacerbate drought. “We see those direct impacts on people and livestock,” he said. “And we see in data the extreme evaporation of moisture in soils.” 

Despite a warmer winter with below-average snowfall, Montana hasn’t fared too badly this summer, but Bocinsky says heat like this will quickly change that. “We’ve been so lucky across the state this summer with persistent precipitation, but what we’re seeing right now is these hot temperatures settling in and drying out soils rapidly.”

Back in Glendive, Thelma and Louise did survive, and are back to life outside on the ranch. Scherr hopes not to discover any more surprise hatches, at least until the fall.

This story originally appeared in the Montana Free Press, which can be found online at montanafreepress.org.