The Christmas weekend Siberian Express dropped morning lows to single digits where I am (6 and 8 on two different mornings, plus daytime highs in the 20s for a couple of days). My animal housing is not particularly robust against cold. The chicken tractor design that I used (based on Justin Rhodes' plans) is open in the front, and my rabbit hutch is very open: again, the emphasis in the design is on keeping them cool, not warm.
If it routinely got this cold--particularly with wind--I'd have the rabbits in an open shed, probably, where tarps could easily be draped across the front to block the wind. And the chickens would probably have a coop they could be closed up in.
As it was, all of the animals made it through okay. Everyone's water froze repeatedly.
On the coldest day, even the water I put out mid-morning froze by afternoon. So I kept swapping out crocks for the rabbits and waterers for the chickens. After the first couple of days, the highs started going back above freezing again and the daytime water wouldn't freeze.
None of the animals exhibited any distress; all behaved pretty normally. No frostbite on the rabbits' ears, although the roosters had a touch of frostbite on their combs (note the last two spikes in the picture below).
I was able to keep the house habitable with the wood stove, but it struggled to warm it up the first morning (the storm blew in early morning on a Friday, and Saturday morning was the six-degree low). The house was in the upper 40s Saturday morning, and the stove took most of the day to get it warmed up into the normal range. Fortunately, I was able to be home to tend it.
I'm glad it's not routinely like this.
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