(Illustration by Daria Kirpach)
Our house came with a chicken coop, complete with a fenced-in chicken run. We were used to cats: after the one we had for 16 years died, we loaded up with four more. Four cats is a lot, but that didn’t prepare us for chickens.
Our roofer, an animal lover himself, gifted us with six chickens: two Ameraucanas, two Plymouth Rocks, and two Rhode Island Reds. My wife, wanting them to be tough, named them after her favorite Game of Thrones characters, all women not to be trifled with: Cersei, Catelyn, Arya, Daenerys, Sansa, and Brienne.
I decked out their chicken coop to the hilt. Beyond the standard feeders and waterers, we installed an automatic door that let them out first thing in the morning and closed after they settled in for the night. We set up cameras inside and outside the coop. I put in a sprinkler system to cool them in the heat and a heater to warm them in the cold and, in an attempt to weatherproof them against Texas’s brutally hot summers, even rigged an air-conditioning system using frozen water jugs and a fan. I was determined to turn them into tech natives, outfitted with the latest (chicken) gadgets.
