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Chicken surveillance and friend cameos

We joined the wireless security community this weekend
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The backyard dinosaurs in summer (Christi Albers-Manicke/BLACK PRESS)

We hooked up our ring doorbell and our backyard cameras this weekend while it was nice out.

Now I can keep an eye on things while I’m gone. In my small-town crime is a problem but no place seems free of that right now (and never will be). Even the peace of mind when it comes to my kids and my animals that it offers.

The first thing we did when we got this marvel of technology hooked up, was mess with our chickens. We let them roam around the backyard when we’re home (in our yard, they’re not out roaming the neighbourhood, causing havoc to small children and dogs) and since it was nice out they we’re cruising the yard. During their confident stroll around the yard they ended up walking into the one room of one out building that currently houses a mom rabbit and some babies.

So obviously we used the two way voice feature to yell at the chickens. When we called to them they would poke their head out of the ‘rabbit room’, look around, make some noise, then duck back in. Once again, we would call to them and they would poke their head out.

Throughout the day we didn’t get to do much or see much. Later, I was able to use the backyard view to watch the husband and an impressive demonstration of his livestock herding skills. It was even nice enough to send me an alert so I could watch as he slipped around the back yard yelling ‘stupid birds, get in there. No, that way…’

But other than that we were stuck waiting until someone came to the house. No one came, so we had to move on to the next best thing. The kid.

We didn’t tell him that we had secured the homestead while he was away at the grandparents, so naturally we also used it to scare the kid. We sent him out to the garbage can in the dark, locked him out of the house (briefly and he had a coat on), and then the husband used his best scary voice to induce a short scream followed by a ‘oh cool we got a doorbell now!’, to be clear, we had always had a doorbell just not one he could yell at.

We then utilized the kid to test the ‘night vision’, we made him run around the back yard in the dark on the ice with various tripping hazard buried in the snow and I must say, we got his fall in high definition with pretty clear sound.

Honestly I hope I don’t get too many notifications, or not bad ones anyway. If it’s the town’s moose wandering through my yard, sure! If it’s my kid’s friends ringing the doorbell to see if he wants to play, even better but hopefully I never have to use it as an attachment in a police report.