Which Came First the Chicken or the Coop?

or was it the egg?

Ahh, the age old question…Which came first the chicken or the…coop. Spoiler alert, it was the chickens, or peepers as they call them in the business. Those irresistible little creatures at your friendly neighborhood farm store. We have always stopped to window shop over the years but never pulled the trigger. This year was different. We have the land. We have other animals that require daily chores. We have a desire to be more self sufficient and provide more of our own food for our household. So this year, when the first peepers arrived we bought a 1/2 dozen. Three Blue Plymouth Rock and three Buff Orpington.

Emma Walsmith

did all the research. We wanted chickens that wouldn’t upset the magical balance we have with three (now 4) Alpacas, two baby fainting goats, 4 matching sibling orange boy barn cats, two outdoor Great Pyrenees guardian dogs, three indoor dogs (including a fearless long haired Miniature Dachshund) and an elderly indoor cat.

This made-for-television Disney movie can be followed along with on my wife’s substack,

stories from the waypoint ✨

According to the internet the Blue Plymouth Rock and the Buff Orpington breeds fit the bill and are prolific layers. We loaded up the peepers in a little cardboard box and filled our shopping cart with a brooder box, heat lamp, waterer, feeder, chicken electrolytes, feed, grit, chicken herbs and anything else that the farm store said we needed to keep them alive and took them home. We set them up in our home office where we could control the access from the other animals. We had 2 months before we would need to move them outside. It was then that we realized we didn’t have a chicken coop.

As I type this now I realize it could have been a series of posts about peeper rearing, what you do and don’t need, fears of bird flu, and how do you keep them warm when the power goes out for a couple of days. This is an essay about a coop. Which came first, the chicken or the coop? Now you know. The chickens came first. We had no idea what we were going to do for a coop. We had lots of discussions. Should we use a section of the alpaca barn? Should we use an old dog house? Should we buy a decrepit camper and turn it into a recreational chicken vehicle (RCV)?

Luckily, my brother Ben is staying with us and he said, “Why don’t you just build it? I’ll help.” That was the confidence boost we needed. We decided we would build it from scratch using wood from our neighborhood sawmill, Bear Creek Hardwoods as well as some odds and ends we had laying around the farm. Bear Creek Hardwoods had a surplus pile of lumber that was too short, too crooked, too curvy, too bent, or too warped to sell to the general public but would work perfect for a chicken coop.

“Chickens don’t care,” was a mantra repeated often during the building process. We embraced the flow of the build. We measured once and cut twice, sometimes 3 or 4 times. We eyeballed it. We nailed and re-nailed. We screwed and unscrewed and screwed again. We covered up gaps with layers. We covered up layers with tin. We salvaged parts off of other contraptions. Even in describing this it sounds like it would make it easier and faster. It did not. The process drug on and on. Just when we started gaining momentum it rained or snowed or we had to leave for a week of travel.

Little problems at the beginning led to bigger problems throughout the project. It was a problem solving project. The biggest problem was that the chickens kept getting bigger and bigger. The peepers turned into squawkers. It was becoming a big clucking deal. The clock was ticking. We needed to get these chickens out of our basement office before it turned into an unrecoverable permanent chicken coop. Luckily, I work well under deadline and the deadline was approaching. We needed to get these girls in the coop and that pressure encouraged us to stay the course and finish this coop.

We call it the Chicken Shack. It has a real Salvadore Dali look to it.

The chickens like it. So do the goats, dogs, cats and alpacas.

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