Our chicken project continues. My friends Brian and Mel are pursuing their own chicken project in the US on a timeline roughly similar to ours, so its sortof the International Chicken Brotherhood. Brian’s chicken coop is WAY more elaborate than ours- as ours is done in the local style. [update: he just finished it] This made me think of posting some gallinero (chicken coop) pictures online, for everyone’s enjoyment. If you don’t care about chickens, then you might want to skip the rest of the post

The Gallinero Gallery

This is our gallinero I built a few weeks ago, hanging from the side of our house. We still don’t have any chickens yet 🙁 Also, since it’s getting cold, I’m going to add a lightbulb heater this weekend.	Most of the coops here are built on stilts, I guess to protect against predators (I’ve never seen any). They have removable chicken stairs.	Or, if you don’t like stilts, you can just hang it from a tree with rope.
This is one of my favorites, an archetype I see a lot of: a triangle, with scraps of roofing steel to cover it. This one has a GREAT view.	This one’s at our neighbor Petronela’s house. She stores her harvested greens in the elevated, caged box next to it. I don’t know why.	This one looks like a kid’s treehouse, but is another great place for chickens to spend the night.
This gallinero is right along the road as we come into town. I took this picture as the sun was setting (as you can see).	This coop belongs to the lady we’re going to buy our chickens from. She says they prefer to roost in the nearby trees at night. What can you do?	And, for comparison, here’s Brian’s chicken coop. Double pane windows, insulation, a heater, a DOOR… it’s nicer than any house I’ve ever seen in Guatemala. 🙂

So, now I will share some funny chicken stories. The other day, Emily and I were walking through town and came across a lady and her elderly mother, who was sitting on a pile of firewood. We chatted with the lady, and she mentioned that her mother (a granny) was sitting because she is very tired, as she has diabetes. The granny was just sortof watching us talk, as she didn’t speak Spanish. She looked at peace. Meanwhile, their chickens were going about their business in the yard, scrathching and pecking. Their rooster at the edge of the yard was crowing occasionally, something I don’t notice much anymore.

As we contined talking, I noticed the rooster strutting its way across the yard towards the grandmother. I hate roosters, by the way, because of their cocky attitude (pun intended). Anyways, this was a really big rooster, and he walked all the way across the yard and right up to the granny, who was paying attention to us. He then cocked his head, looked at the granny, and belted out a LOUD “cock-a-doodle-doooooooo” right at her. The old lady must have leapt a foot in the air, from her seat atop the woodpile. It was hilarious, and took all my self control not to bust out laughing.

The granny was not amused. Her face turned into a big, prunish frown and she glared at the rooster. Then, with no warning, she hucked a piece of firewood at it! The rooster make a loud clucking noise, flapped its wings, and took off. This was even more hilarious. Satisfied that justice had been done, the granny settled back down and continued to watch us.

Right, so that’s it for the Chick Page. Oh, and I was transplanting some of our broccoli today, and one of the neighbor hens came into our yard (if you can call it a yard) and brought her chicks. I could hear their peeping 10 yards off. Here are some pix: