Fancy chicken coops: Mainers are spending thousands on hen houses

Spurred on by a pandemic boom in backyard bird-raising and increasing emotional bonds between people and poultry, the world of chicken coop design has expanded rapidly. While many Maine homesteaders still take a no-frills approach, larger and more decorative coops with automated features are growing here.

“There’s some outrageous ones out there,” said Bruce Colman, a Saco-based chicken coop builder with customers from Machias to Cape Cod and farther south.

At minimum, chickens need a safe place to roost, sleep and lay their eggs.

They can also have doors that open and shut on timers, solar-powered water heaters, fully wired electricity, multiple stories, automatic wheels and a foundation. Some of those don’t work as well in Maine, coop builders said, because of limited winter daylight and frequent power outages.

Advanced design features aren’t always for fun. Brad and Shira Roberts built a 10-by-10-foot coop, covered run, two outdoor runs and duck house in East Dover for their first backyard poultry several years ago, which protect their birds and keep them healthy.

“We knew we needed to have a ‘Fort Knox’ type of chicken coop to keep predators from killing our birds,” Shira Roberts said.

They also wanted the coop to be long-lasting, as functional as possible, and offer room to roam while protecting the flock from the elements. They don’t free-range their birds because of the predator risk.

The hand-milled cedar building is traditional board and batten with maple floors and metal roofing, a storage room, multiple windows, a feed chute and a filtered water collection system with a stock tank heater. Outside, their 5-year-old daughter keeps a flower garden.

Other times, design features are for fun. Colman, who’s been building coops for 14 years, completed one recently that features bold floral wallpaper, teal-painted wood, a gold-framed mirror, a trinket shelf, curtains around each nesting box and a full-sized chandelier with Edison light bulbs.

He’s finished more with window boxes full of flowers, shutters and front porches.

Colman built his first coop with his brother to surprise his mother. They hoped having the birds to care for would help her stay active in her 70s.

She’s not the only person connected to poultry as more than a food source. They aren’t all emotional support chickens, but the birds are becoming like pets to many.

Their resurgence began well before the pandemic, said  Lisa Steele, who raises chickens, geese and ducks and writes about them from her home in Dixmont for a social media audience of nearly a million. During the 2008 recession, she noticed more people wanting to be self-sufficient.

That leveled off, then surged again during the pandemic’s supply chain fears and the high egg prices that followed. Chick suppliers were swamped with business. Colman built coops for three years straight.

Though interest has started to level off, new chicken owners remain.

They aren’t just putting more money into coops; even treats are available that didn’t exist a decade ago. Grubs, for example, have grown so popular that new producers are opening in North America.

One such startup estimated in November 2023 that the pet chicken market was worth $4 billion.

“You can go broke buying treats for your chickens,” Steele said.

She thinks companies saw money to be made in adapting their products to chickens or creating new ones as the pandemic created a bigger customer base.

Steele also hopes people will focus on safety for the birds before they think about decorating. Thrifty New Englanders are somewhat less receptive to chicken luxuries, she said, and she sometimes gets pushback online when posting about them.

Maine isn’t completely hostile to the idea, though. The Fryeburg Fair holds an annual coop raffle, and a former contest hosted by the Maine Poultry Association and the University of Maine Cooperative Extension awarded new designs.

In fact, local customer demand led the nation’s only design-and-build Hobbit hole company, based in Thorndike, to add a line of coops about six years ago.

Melissa Pillsbury, who started building the hobbit holes with her husband Rocy in 2009, said passers-by at the Common Ground Country Fair in Unity often suggested coops. The Champion Coops line has been successful; they just added a duck option and have new products in the works.

Along with its appearance, their design is unique because it can be cleaned without having to bend or squat. The run and the roost are in the same space. That means older and less mobile customers are able to have birds at home, too.

Many started out with small plastic coops from big-box stores and were ready to make an investment in something safe and accessible that would last. Champion Coops are relatively small, and many of their customers have less than 10 birds which they often cherish.

“At that scale, they’re probably going to be more like pets than farm equipment,” Pillsbury said.

“They’re individuals, not just a flock.”