National Agricultural Library

Trap Nests

The first of Robert Frost's poultry articles was "Trap Nests." It describes the troubles met by a husband and wife as they start a backyard poultry flock. The couple tries to compel their uncooperative hens into laying by putting them into trap nests. These are structures that keep each chicken confined until she produces an egg.
The story was meant to portray the gap between dreams of easy riches from poultry farming and the difficult realities of actually managing a working--or not working--flock.

George P. Goffin, Freeport Maine

"...They are like ordinary nests, except that they have doors like a bootjack hanging on hinges from the top, the points of the inverted 'V' resting on the inside of a sill so that it can only open inward."

"Very well, we will make them, and then none of the old maids in the neighborhood will be any the wiser."

So the trap nests were installed. The hens took the opposite side of the pen and craned at them with a scandalized cackling, and then forgot them, and went about their business---which was not laying...."

page 71

The Eastern Poultryman, Volume 4, Number 5, page 71