History of the Backyard Chickens website

This information relates to the prior owner of BYC. For recent info click here.

This all started in 1999, when my son was in Kindergarten. In the Spring, like most Kindergartens, they hatched eggs in class as part of a Science lesson unit. Those baby chicks were pampered and handled so much!

June rolled around, "graduation" time, and no arrangements had been made for the chicks (I have a feeling this oversight is pretty common). I had been pretty involved in the Science end of things - so "Science Dad", that would be me, got "volunteered" to bring home 7 half-grown, partly-feathered chickens.

"What do I do now?", I thought. I love animals, but I never had one with feathers, much less a chicken. So, I turned to the Internet. I found out how to feed them one place, a different opinion another place, and nowhere to be found were decent instructions for building a chicken coop.

So, when I figured out what I would build, I took pictures step-by-step of our coop to post and (hopefully) help other folks with the same questions.

That one page, coop designs, started this website. I built a lot of tree forts when I was a kid, so making one on the ground was pretty easy. My lame little design sketch is still posted there.

As I came across more useful and consistent information, I posted it and made more pages, mostly pictures at first, then (I think) the links and resources section.

Well, I started getting more and more email, and added pages and pages. At some point I reserved our own domain name "backyardchickens.com" to use for this evolving project.

In 2002, we moved the site to a new, much faster server - all the traffic was bogging down the old one! I've been through a couple of Message Boards, as some of you know, and I think we have one now we can live with for a while.

As I write this it is January 2003, and last month we topped ONE MILLION unique visitors! I never, ever thought this would become such a portal for chicken information and people with this interest to come together to share information.

It's grown far beyond my original idea, and it's great to see this site become something really useful for anyone interested in raising, breeding and caring for these cool birds.

What's coming up next? The Breeds section will be expanded greatly, and some other new interesting pages are in the works!

Enjoy! If you have comments or questions, turn to the Message Forum - it's one of the friendliest boards around and you will get a LOT of great answers to any questions you may have.

Oh yes, one more thing - we still have one original chicken from the Kindergarten class - Goldie, survivor of opossum and coyote, matriarch and still the boss of our Backyard Chickens family.

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