A while back they had a stump in front of the house with a family of foxes living in it and they pointed a game camera at it.
Night after night they got footage of the fox mama bringing back other people's chickens to feed to her kits.
The moral is, I think, that the well-built chicken coop is a good investment.
If you want to think in knots, go down the internet rabbit hole of investigating how the knotter in a hay baler works :-)
I also love the accuracy you can get if you work on it - I'm thinking things like those giant castle doors weighing multiple tons, but a child can push them open if unbarred.
For a while now, "brains can think of knots" has been on that list. Imagine some aliens who are generally much smarter than us, but they need computers to indirectly create or solve knots, and textiles were a late- rather than early-invention.
Granted, this seems unlikely, but it's still amusing to consider.
It'll be strange to replace my front door with a guillotine slider, but I'm willing to try about anything since I found him half a block away playing in a puddle last week.
I literally just tried to send one text message. Poof he was gone.
The door itself has a spring loaded catch at the bottom, which is retracted when the door is lifted, via a little mechanism built into the door. Pull up on the peg, the latch retracts, and you can slide the door open
The controller was the weakest part of this whole assembly. It worked, but was crude and often would lock hens out, like when summer thunderstorms would darken the sky. It just used a light sensor
Last year I replaced the controller with an Esphome device I built, and it's been going strong all summer and winter
https://pdx.su/blog/2025-06-11-how-a-simple-chicken-coop-doo...
If you want to spend a bit more and don't like "smart" doors, I used one of these for years and was reasonably satisfied: https://chickendoors.com/
In my next coop I think I want something with enough smarts to let me know if it ever fails. That is, it reports status and if the server notices it hasn't gotten a report, I get an alert.
I’m working on exactly that, called SecureCoop. Being in IT the lack of notifications on doors was a huge concern. So I (over-)built redundancies and notifications and server monitoring and clustering.
I’m still working out kinks in the prototype but I hope to be selling later this year. Need to take it to an FCC lab to verify that it doesn’t cause excess interference, and then I can sell.
And then a reminder sent to my phone 10 minutes past dusk to shut the door, if it is still open at that time.
It's rigged but the confirmation is nice.
Edit: most of sensors run by esp32 boards running esphome. Also include a temp sensor etc, fed into home assistant
My dad used to keep chicken and they just went through the same door and we'd just open it in the morning and close it in the evening.
Other people in my home town have similar arrangements and I feel I'm missing some important thing :)
Easier to automate a small door, and control where it goes.
It looks cooler; people like "small doors for small things" - like the half-height garage doors at Walmart for shopping carts.
If small enough, it can reduce at least SOME predator incidents (but this is minor).
I don't want to enter the enclosure, so I have my own door to go in and service the coop, fetch the eggs, etc.
The enclosure has a gate when I want to let the chickens out, as well.
Having an enclosure lets me leave the house for a couple days, at least, and not feel like I've imprisoned them.
Here's my fun everything likes to eat chickens story. When we first built our house, nobody had ever lived within about 2 miles of our farm. There were coyotes everywhere. So I spent a couple years trapping and shooting them after they ate a couple of my chickens. Then came the racoons. They ate some chickens so back to trapping and shooting. Then weasels and minks. Except they could get into the coop through the windows in the wall that were covered in wire and 6' off the ground. So, more traps. Now it's bobcats. Oh, and don't forget the stupid red-tailed hawks and BALD FUCKING EAGLES as well. No trapping or shooting those bastards.
Everything. Everything eats chickens. I'm surprised I haven't seen a damn frog eating one of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Biggest_Little_Farm
Similar challenges, but attempts at natural solutions (not easy, so much complexity)
Totally enjoyable watch, but I wouldn't look for real world farming advice here.
A few days later it happens again. Huh, so she asks some locals what the heck is going on. It turns out a big snake was getting in there and eating the chicken, but then he was too fat to get back out of the coop so he had to barf it up to escape.
These kind of things is what the ‘www’ was created for - good vibes!
Why riddle it with ads?
Source: myself through wife which is maxed on chickens and has her own site with no ads
And I my point was I really like the site!
I promise to become lessvocal about the ads.