Inventor hatches coop safety plan

When a fox snuck in and devoured Kiev the lucky lottery chicken, her owner hatched plans for an "eggstraordinary" device designed to keep his money-spinning birds safe.

Now Billy Gibbons, of Audlem, near Market Drayton, has unveiled his invention dubbed the automatic electronic pre-timed evening chicken coop door shutting mechanism device to keep the birds safe.

It automatically shuts the chicken coop door behind the birds when they head indoors each evening.

Mr Gibbons said he was inspired to create the device when a fox killed one of his birds - Kiev - which chose five winning lottery numbers for him in 2003, winning him a £1,200 nest egg

Kiev entered National Lottery folklore when she knocked a calculator off Mr Gibbons' desk and pecked off the rubber numbers to get at some bird seed.

Mr Gibbons entered a mixture of the remaining numbers and those Kiev had walked across as she pecked at the calculator on to his lottery slip - and the five chosen by Kiev came up in the August 23 draw.

Kiev was subsequently renamed Lucky, but her luck ran out when a fox got into her coop and she was killed.

Mr Gibbons, a fan of 1950s memorabilia, said he used a mix of weird and wonderful items to fashion his door shutting device in the wake of Lucky's death.

They include a transformer from an old railway set and the windscreen wiper from a 1950s car.

He said: "When it gets to bedtime for them, they make their way to the hen house, go through the door and up on the perches to roost as most chickens do but, if you're out gallivanting and not there to lock the door behind them, and Mr or Mrs Fox are on the prowl they could get killed as happened here in the past.

"So after a bit of thinking, I came up with an idea."

Moments after the chickens go to roost at dusk, a timer switch connected to the mains sends power to a 1959 Hornby train transformer, which converts the electricity to 12 volts.

The current then enters a 1956 Vauxhall Cresta wiper motor, which spins round one revolution, pulling with it a door bolt attached by some string.

Mr Gibbons added: "If you imagine a castle drawbridge upside down, that's what it looks like. The door drops onto two self-locking gate latches and, hey presto, a safe night for the chickens."

By Tom Johannsen