Category: Chickens

I’ve been fascinated with automatic chicken coop doors.   My current auto coop door closer has been working like a champ for months.  I received a lot of great replies to that thread, and one of them was from a visitor named Bob.    I was so impressed with his design and pictures I asked him if I Read More …

Rest In Peace Ming-Ming Duck After years of thinking about this, and after 2 separate raccoon attacks I finally found some time to create a prototype / proof of concept of my auto chicken coop door closer.    You can read the details of the initial design here: http://www.nifty-stuff.com/automatic-chicken-coop-door.php.  

Rest In Peace Grey Chicken I’ve been wanting to design an automatic chicken coop door closer for years.   There are plenty of other systems out there that automatically open and close the coop door, but they are expensive and, well, not designed by me!  😉 Basically my idea is to create a simple system that is Read More …

  When my wife and I were thinking about getting chickens one of our concerns was how difficult it would be to care for them. I’ve got friends who completely “baby” their chickens (e.g. chicken diapers, baths, cleaning their watering dishes daily with bleach, etc.). I’ve also got friends who barely even deal with their Read More …

5/24/05 An hour ago my wife and I decided to go outside to see how our girl was doing. I was horrified to see a broken egg in front of the nest. It looked like something had torn its way into the egg… but wait a minute, maybe I’m wrong. I gently lifted up my Read More …

5/4/05 She’s still in the nest this morning.  Chel told me that the eggs, even if they are a few days old, won’t start to develop until they have a hen sitting on them.  This is good because we are going on a little trip and don’t want to miss the big day! I heard Read More …

SATURDAY 12/11/04 Picked up our first 5 chicks from a friend. They are half RIR and half Australorp and are 3 weeks old. Hens or Roosters… we just don’t know. Here is a picture of the parent chicks and Alana with the chicks (she’s so happy).        A video of Alana sharing her Cheerios with Read More …

Recently one of my chickens went broody. You can see the story here. I decided to put my egg candling experience on a separate page, so here it is!

5/3/05 A lot has been happening over the past few days. First I got an email two days ago from the guy who took my 4 original chicks. He said they all turned out as roosters. Here’s a picture and here’s the story. Also, yesterday my young black hen laid her first egg.. it looked Read More …

(it may be ugly, but it is raccoon proof and the parts were free) (Here are our NEW CHICKENS! Click here for the whole story! ) Step 1: First thing I did was to design my coop. I looked at a ton of great examples and took the ideas I liked best. Here are some Read More …