So over the years we have had to recycle chicken names. We have had so many Rooster Cogburns and Henny Pennys and Henriettas and Pluckys and Cluckys. But sunning snakes in the front yard? Not a one. I have seen the hens running with small snakes in their beaks like they just snagged the best Blue Light Special at Kmart. I don’t ask questions. But with our flock comes the nighttime and not-so-nighttime critters looking for a chicken buffet handout. So a secure coop was necessary.

When we first moved into our home, it had some odd features that we didn’t understand, like off the master bath was a little sliding glass door and a little walled in garden-esk area (?) What?/Why? It was a standard blueprint type home. Some friends guessed it was for nude sunbathing in suburbia……..I don’t know. If I want to go nude, I’m far enough out in the boonies that I’ll only shock the opossums. So where some people saw nude sunbathing, I saw an opportunity for a secure chicken coop………….we cut a hole in the side wall of the now-coop by my bedroom window; affixed a trap-door complete with ramp to the ground and a cord with a pulley-system through my bedroom window. We put laying boxes on the inside walls and cut saplings for perches for roosting and voila. Our coop. Which worked out well. I would feed the chickens in there and they would go in and out all day long for food and resting or whatever. Then at dusk they basically trained themselves to go to the “safe” area to perch for the night. I would pull the cord though my bedroom window which would pull up the coop’s trap door and I’d tie it off on a nail that I had pounded into the wall. That would bring the trap door up for the night to keep hungry critters out and my chickens in.

The coop didn’t have a roof on it at that time. The chickens would perch along the top of the walls and on the sapling perches provided. In the mornings at dawn they “flew the coop” so to speak or waited until I would open the trap door for the remaining ones to walk out. It worked well for a while. Until some raccoons decided to pick out their dinners from the hens sleeping on the top, scale the outside wall and snag a chicken by the tail feathers and run off with it. And yes, there was the remaining dreaded “poof” of feathers………..