Hennsylvania is a 24/7 live stream of a real backyard chicken coop, broadcast on Twitch from the suburbs of Pittsburgh since November 2021. Eleven hens live here. The Treat Feeder, controlled through Twitch chat, lets viewers drop real treats into the real coop in real time. The flock is older than the stream — the founding chicks arrived on August 25, 2020 — and the project has grown, in stages, ever since.
I'm AxsDeny. Some of the chat calls me Axs. Some have started calling me Chicken Daddy. I'm a software engineer by day, and Hennsylvania is the project I built around the actual chickens in my actual backyard. I built the coop, I built the run, I built the Treat Feeder, I wrote the bot that runs the feeder and tracks every viewer's Feedbag, and I run the stream that lets everyone participate.
It started with a security camera.
When I got my first chickens during the pandemic, I put a camera in the coop because I wanted to be able to keep an eye on them during the day. Then I worried something might happen to one of them, so I added more cameras for better coverage. Then I needed somewhere to store the footage — and I didn't want to spend money on a network video recorder. Twitch, as it happens, holds VODs for two weeks. So I started streaming the coop to my @AxsDeny channel, and used Twitch as a free 14-day buffer.
The audience showed up uninvited. People from my personal Twitch community started watching. Then they started subscribing. So I built a simple bot that let subscribers change the camera angle through chat commands. About a year later, I added more cameras, designed the Treat Feeder, and started building the system that the project runs on today.
I never set out to build a chicken cam. I was trying to keep an eye on my chickens. Hennsylvania happened to me.
Two reasons, both real.
First, my family wanted a sustainable food source during the pandemic. Fresh eggs from a backyard flock fit the bill, and chickens turn out to be excellent company on top of being productive. That part hasn't changed — the eggs are still the eggs, and the hens are still the hens.
Second, the flock genuinely brings people joy and brings people together. Online, the chat that's grown up around the stream has become its own community — people make jokes, root for the same hens, mark the same milestones. Friendships have formed there. Two members of the chat met in this stream's community, eventually moved across the country to be together, and are now married with a child. That's not a thing I expected when I plugged in the first camera, and it's not a thing I take lightly.
In person, the project has had its own life. People in our neighborhood started coming by to look through the fence at the chickens, and over time it became prominent enough that I installed an actual window in the fence so they could see better. The locals, with no involvement from me, started calling it The Peep Show.
That's why it exists. Eggs, and the strange ways that a small backyard coop can connect people.
The stream runs 24 hours a day from the coop, with multiple camera angles and audio. The hens go about their lives. They eat, they roost, they sort out the pecking order, they lay eggs, they argue about who gets the best spot in the dust bath. Most of the time, very little of consequence is happening. That is part of the appeal.
The interactive part is the Treat Feeder. It's a real device that dispenses real treats into the real coop, connected to Twitch chat through a bot I wrote myself. When a viewer subscribes, cheers bits, redeems channel points, or otherwise supports the flock, the feeder dispenses on stream within seconds.
Behind the chat commands is the Feedbag — a personal credit balance for every viewer. The bot watches Twitch's event system in real time, translates each event into the right outcome (instant drop, banked credit, subscription bonus, daily free feed), and tracks contributions across streams. Treat credits in your Feedbag survive offline periods and roosting hours, so no support is ever wasted. Took some doing. Works well.
Eleven hens currently live in the coop, each with a name, a personality, and a place in the pecking order:
Several hens have lived at Hennsylvania over the years and have since passed: Peeper Peep Poppins, the founding queen and the original White Leghorn; Lil Blue, the smallest hen, who laid the bluest eggs; and Brooks Orpington, who was simply, calmly here for nearly four years. Their pages are preserved at hennsylvania.com/chickens/in-memoriam.
Full bios for the current flock live at hennsylvania.com/chickens.
The audience that's grown around the stream is, in many ways, the most surprising part of this project. People come for the chickens and stay for each other. The chat has its own jokes. It watches the same hens fight the same fights. It treats the flock as a cast of characters worth caring about. When something significant happens in the coop — a new hen joining, a chicken passing, an egg-laying milestone — the response is real.
If you're new here, the easiest way to get the feel of it is to watch for ten minutes and read the chat. The chickens will be doing chicken things. Someone will be feeding them. Someone else will be cracking a joke about Beyoncé. That's pretty much the whole thing.
For press inquiries, partnerships, or anything else: hennsylvania@gmail.com.
A press kit with photos and additional details is available on request.