The Great Chicken Adventure: Settling In for Winter

Even though it feels like I've had my chickens forever, this is really just my first year with them, and I've never even had chickens over winter yet! So far this is what Ive done to prepare them for winter. I cleaned their coop pretty thoroughly. I scraped up all the old bedding and replaced it with fresh stuff. A mix of pine shavings and straw. Now that the birds are older I find they spend most of their time pooping off the roosts, so its really packed at the back of the coop and in the rest of the area its fairly clean. We locked up the little door and nailed a board over the inside to keep out drafts. Ive closed the air vents, except on warmer days I open them for a bit of air circulation. I stopped letting them outside after the days were in the minuses, day and night. The days are much shorter and I find that the birds go to roost around 4:30 or 5pm. Ive been collected from 3 - 10 eggs per day, usually in the lower numbers though. The Buff Orpintons lay a light to medium beige coloured egg but the dual purpose birds lay the most beautiful big dark brown eggs. The only downfall is that they usually lay their eggs on the floor, and not in the nest boxes. I get one huge egg that's even bigger than a turkey egg. If I had a scale Id weigh it. And sure enough that egg is always a double yolk!
Here you can see its size compared to a regular sized egg:

Today when I was doing my chores I watched my birds for a while - they do the strangest things. I bet an animal psychologist would get such a kick out of my flock, because I sure do! If I haven't mentioned this before, Rob is certainly the king. Everyone listens to him. Fluffy and Garden Boy - the other roosters, are subordinate and they obey him. So today I watched Rob do what Im assuming was an election, or a loyalty call of sorts. He went to a corner and faced the wall, and then he didn't make any noise. But all the hens and all the roosters snugged right into that corner with him. They were all crowding to get as close into that corner as they could. There wasnt any food over there, there wasn't anything to scare them to that corner. Ive never seen anything like that before, and Im glad I had my camera.