Oliver Hayes

Choosing the best marine GPS units for small boats comes down to two things most spec sheets never mention: whether the screen physically fits your console, and whether the transducer cable reaches the transom. We spent a season running ten shortlisted units across a jon boat, an 18-foot center console and a PWC setup, and … Read more

The best motorcycle GPS navigators for touring are the Garmin zūmo XT2 for riders who want fully offline navigation with no phone involved, the Beeline Moto II for long battery life and simplicity, and the Wonsidary W722 for riders who would rather mirror their phone on a bright waterproof handlebar screen. All three handle vibration, … Read more

Wrist GPS watches have quietly become the least glamorous and most useful piece of backcountry kit you can buy. A watch weighs less than a tenth of an ounce, never runs out of memory, and keeps drawing a track line while your phone sits dead in a bear canister. That durability comes at a cost … Read more

A walk-in chicken coop is one tall enough for an adult to stand upright and move around inside, which in practice means 6 to 6.5 ft of interior headroom. That height is the whole point once you are keeping 20 to 60 birds, because a crouch-in box turns every scoop of bedding and every egg … Read more

Most chicken keepers learn the same lesson the hard way: the coop they sealed up tight in October is the coop that causes trouble in January. Warm, damp air with nowhere to go condenses on the roost bars, the bedding goes sour, and combs and wattles get frostbitten while the birds huddle in a warm … Read more

Six hens is the sweet spot for a backyard flock. Big enough that you are not managing a handful of birds, small enough that one coop handles the whole flock overnight. The trouble is that most coops advertised for six hens are nowhere near that size once you measure the actual interior floor, subtract the … Read more

A mobile chicken coop is a movable poultry shelter that you roll or drag to fresh ground so your flock always has new forage, the manure spreads out instead of piling up in one corner, and parasites never get a permanent home. Our pick for the best mobile chicken coops for pasture rotation in is … Read more

A chicken run is a secure, predator-resistant outdoor enclosure that sits beside or attaches to a chicken coop, giving birds open-air space to scratch, forage, dust-bathe and sunbathe during the day while keeping raccoons, foxes, feral cats, hawks and digging predators out. A coop is the sheltered structure where birds roost and lay; the run … Read more

The manual turning routine is what breaks people. You set eggs on day one, then commit three to five times a day for 18 to 21 days, opening the lid, rolling each egg, closing the lid again. On a hot afternoon that is a chore you resent. Automatic egg turners for incubators take that whole … Read more

If you want the short answer, the best egg candler for hatching right now is the Magicfly Rechargeable Egg Candler, because its cool LED reaches through darker shells and its two rubber covers handle everything from quail eggs to goose eggs. For raw brightness pick the Incu-Bright Ultra Bright, and for a classroom or 4-H … Read more