Thanks to my agent, Sally McMillan, for good conversations, good feedback, and perseverance in the face of adversity.
This well-crafted book wouldn’t be in your hands without the talents, collegiality, and hard work of Deb Burns, Corey Cusson, Deborah Balmuth, Michaela Jebb, Liz Nemeth, Alex Tricoli, Michael Gellatly, Janet Renard, Jim Sollers, Karen Martin, Alee Moncy, Melinda Slaving, Ilona Sherratt, Megan Posco, and Sarah Armour.
Thanks to henkeepers and helpers Katie Ford, Johnny Ford, Bob Davis, Judy Davis, Beverly Norwood, Woody Collins, Michelle Old, Hillary Nichols, Micaela Stanton, Casey Stanton, Felipe Witchger, Michele Kloda, Cyrus Dastur, Alena Dastur, Amy Stewart, Suvir Saran, Hans Voerman, Tradd and Olga Cotter, as well as the many henkeepers who’ve been on the Bull City Coop Tour, the Greenboro Coop Loop, and the Raleigh Tour de Coop, for sharing their coops, chickens, and stories with me.
A big nonverbal thank-you to my coworkers on Monkey Island, Turtle Island, and New Light Farm for showing me so much about the minds, bodies, and souls of our fellow animals.
A plumb, level, and square thank-you to carpenters Mark Marcoplos, Sam Dennis, Dave Richardson, Bill Wallace, Jamie Wallace, John Carroll, and so many others, for teaching me how to build anything, as well as how to finish a project with the same number of fingers with which I began it.
A four-dimensional thank-you to my design professors Tracy Traer, Curtis Brooks, Fernando Magallanes, Denis Wood, and Will Hooker for breaking my brain open so that anything I could imagine I could also design and build.
A six-times-a-year thank-you to Roger Sipe, my editor at Chickens magazine, for taking a chance on a type of column that had never appeared in a poultry magazine before. Many of the photos and earlier drafts of some of the text appeared in my “Coop Builder” column in that magazine.
And special thanks to my first editor back in the early 1990s, Gillian Floren at North Carolina’s Indy Week, for Rolfing some proper posture into my then-flabby, flimsy, freshman writing style.