I haven’t added any new chickens to my flock since 2018. As birds get older and pass, the flock keeps getting older and smaller.

I had a few smaller coops that were unused, so I finally set out to take them apart and dismantle them. I didn’t actually anticipate it being so emotional! The last coop I tore down, of three, was Pippin’s Coop, and I built it, no hyperbole, exactly ten years before I took it down, to the day.

Pippin was my first hatch. Pippin’s coop was built immediately after Pippin was born. 

Pippin was half accident, half experiment. I had a hen go broody, my first experience with that. It was April in Arizona, which has very nice weather. So I decided to see if she would hatch any of the eggs she was laying on. A month later, one cute little baby bird hatched. It made the cutest little pip sounds, so it earned its name.

Yes, Pippin was born in a modified Home Depot bucket!

She was the only egg that hatched. It’s not generally a great idea for a baby to be alone, so I contacted a local breeder and bought a sible chick, which naturally needed to be named Merry.

The coop was built in a rush, so I had a place for the babies to grow up a bit before rotating into the flock. It was a pretty secure little coop, built with hardware cloth. The engineering was dubious. Which is to say, it was bad, I didn’t really have a plan (build a box with a door!). As I was deconstructing it, I remember making a lot of the fairly egregious design flaws. 

It was a bit of a learning experiment, but the result was fairly durable. So much so, that it housed many chickens over its ten-year life.

I used it for new hatches for a few years.

After I stopped hatching, Pippin’s Coop spent some time housing my flock of Japanese Bantams. 

I ended up rotating them to a different coop, and after that, it was a coop that my bachelor flock of roosters would sleep in at night.

Eventually, the rooster population got small enough that I was able to parse them out and assign them all hens, and after that, Pippin’s Coop spent its time being a hangout spot during the day. It was a good source of shade and was well ventilated.

Ultimately, I have to downsize everything and my overall chicken population is a fraction of what it was. But, now it’s a manageable area that’s appropriately intimate and my post-stroke’d self can handle it better.

Still, that represented 10 years of my life, and it brought on a lot of weird memories pulling it apart.