By Charlie Pike
Photos by Dave Waddell
From our April 2025 Home & Garden issue
A chorus of a few dozen clucking, crowing chickens, housed in wood-and-mesh-metal pounds, constantly echoes through Jennica Harris’s garage, in Chesterville, a rural town near Farmington. The garage is where most of her flock hunkers down for winter. Harris has stopped hearing the cacophony, but her loyal followers haven’t. “I go live on TikTok with my chickens,” she said, pointing to a tripod by a desk. “And sometimes, when I’m out here filming, I have to redo it, because you can’t hear what I’m saying.”
Harris’s TikTok account documents her adventures in chicken breeding — and in selling chicks, hatching eggs, and eating eggs — at what she has named Boujee Beaks Egg Farm. Her most popular clip has gotten 1.8 million views. In it, posh-looking chickens rock shades and lounge on floats at a pool party in Harris’s yard (“boujee” is a less common spelling of “bougie,” and those partying chickens do indeed exude a sort of knowingly self-satisfied materialism). The video features some Silkies, a Polish — just a couple of the rare breeds Harris raises.
The homey “fluffy butt hut” — decorated with window boxes, curtains, wallpaper, and a chandelier — is where Jennica Harris’s chickens live, but her Bernese mountain dogs like to hang around outside too
She pointed out more one recent morning. A Buff Laced Polish. A Candy Corn Polish, hatched from an egg from a breeder pal in Texas. A Golden Laced here, an Ermine Ameraucana over there. Some have frizzled plumage, others have smooth. “You can’t breed a frizzle with a frizzle,” Harris said. They make a frazzle. “Which is a very unhealthy bird.”
Harris got the idea for Boujee Beaks during the pandemic. A dental assistant for 13 years, she was suddenly staying home and looking for a hobby, so she got some chickens. Soon, she had started showing her elegant breeds at fairs across Maine and bringing home ribbons, which are now pinned against a wall in her coop.
Harris commissioned the coop from Saco-based builder Bruce Coleman, who is well-known in the niche orbit of New England poultry buffs. He’s been constructing custom coops up and down the coast for about 15 years. Harris collaborated with him to design what a sign above the door now dubs a “Fluffy Butt Hut.” The ceiling is high enough for an adult human to stand upright, and Harris wanted a dividing wall in the entry, to create a sort of chicken-free anteroom. There, she stores feed and other supplies and has a sink for washing hands. On the walls hang her ribbons from various fairs, her Farmington Farmers Union certificate, and her National Poultry Improvement Plan certificate, documenting that her chickens have been tested annually for disease. She leaves an old Crosley Companion Radio — a gift from her now-93-year-old grandmother — tuned to 94.9 WHOM, feeding her chickens a steady diet of “The Best Mix of the ’80s, ’90s & Today.” (The sound of the radio also helps deter predators.)
Glittery curtains billow over nesting boxes, where the hens lay their eggs. A round mirror hangs on the back wall, reflecting the lights of a $10 chandelier from Marden’s. “I had to put every single one of these on,” said Harris, gesturing to the strands of lights dangling from the fixture’s metal ring. “I literally spent hours putting that thing together, all for some chickens to shit on.” The walls are papered with a wildflower pattern.
A hatch door provides access from the outside to the nesting boxes, and a sign on it reads “Wicked Chickens Lay Deviled Eggs.” Connected to the coop is a run that Harris’s husband, Seth, built: wooden beams, clear plastic walls, a corrugated metal roof. In the center of the run is a perch Harris built herself. “They go up there every single night,” she said. “Especially in the summer, they’ll all roost on that all night long.” There’s a swing, too, for when the chickens are feeling playful.
Harris wants to build a couple of more replicas of her current coop so each breed can have its own space. Seth wants to pour some concrete and build a barn. Harris would like to get a cow, maybe some bunnies, grow her farm a bit more. “Just simple animals, nothing over the top,” she said. “Chickens are a gateway to wanting more animals. You love it so much . . . ” She smiled as a rooster’s cry cut her off midsentence. “Or you hate it at the same time.”
