Nest Empty No More, Sort Of

In an earlier post I mentioned that my chickens didn't like the ice much either. You may have said, "She has chickens? That's weird." Yeah, I guess it is. We don't live on a farm or ranch or even out in the country, but in an older neighborhood of one of the most densely populated areas of the state, just to the south of Birmingham.

About a year and a half ago, the Music Man jokingly asked if I wanted to get some chickens. Little did he know that I had been secretly planning this very thing but was waiting for the right time to spring it on him. He had lots of questions and a few objections, to which I had answers. Before I knew it I was browsing through poultry catalogs trying to decide what kind of chickens I wanted. He promised to help me build a tractor for them and set about looking at chicken coop plans online. Here's where we found them: http://www.backyardchickens.com/

Tractor? Do you have images of chickens sitting on the seat of a red tractor, steering with their wings and using their toes on the clutch?


No, a chicken tractor is a portable coop/run that rolls across the ground so that you can give the chickens fresh pasture on a regular basis. However, by the time we finished the thing it morphed into an ark rather than a tractor because we couldn't figure out how to put wheels on the thing without raising it up off the ground, leaving space for chickens to get out and varmits to get in. Ours ended up looking like this:

Of course, this was before we put the chickens in. It hasn't looked this nice since then, but it keeps them warm and dry, mostly.