How to make a sliding, self-locking, and predator-proof chicken coop door (2020) (opens in new tab)

It was enclosed. The largest aperture was 20mm. Even enclosed on the floor.

Anyway. Anyone who keeps chickens already knows what I fucked up there.

2am. Almighty screaming from outdoors. A chicken has managed to squeeze its head through the grille, and into the mouth of a fox. Everything then rapidly devolved into a surprisingly large amount of blood, where I’ll just elide the details as they’re kinda grim.

Anyway, the bodies went in the pot the next day, and I now know why chicken wire is specifically called chicken wire.

If you want to think in knots, go down the internet rabbit hole of investigating how the knotter in a hay baler works :-)

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.

I would not want to parent myself. Good kid, generally, so you let your guard down, but when I did go wild it was stuff like that.

Edit: 1970s, no cell phones. Still have a great sense of direction.

Mount it near the top of the door, out of reach of the small escape artist.

I had exactly the same problem and this solved it.

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

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.

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.

Source: myself through wife which is maxed on chickens and has her own site with no ads