As many of you have written to tell me, (keep the emails coming!), watching the chickens via the Hencam is a lot of fun. It connects some of you to a childhood spent on a farm; for others, toiling away in a cubicle with nary a window, it provide a view into a delightful outside world. Some Hencam addicts are college students who find the girls bizarre and amusing.

Believe it or not, ten years ago, when we first got chickens, my husband said, “you know, I could hook a Web cam up to the henhouse.” At the time, we didn’t have electricity to the barn and it would have been a huge and expensive project. Our new barn has electricity, but it was still a huge and expensive project — we installed very good cameras and linking it all to our server, etc. wasn’t easy. And then there was the Web design… But it’s all been worth it. Today I watched the indoor Web cam right when Blackie was trying to crowd Snowball out of a nesting box. It was a match between Stubborn vs. Immobile.

Mine is not the only hencam. At least a dozen other people around the world have had the same idea. Our set-ups differ, but the purpose remains the same — sheer fun. The best listing of hencams is on a German Web site. Go see!