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Well|Eleven Women, Nine Dogs, Not Much Drama (and No Guys)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/well/eleven-women-nine-dogs-not-much-drama-and-no-guys.html
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Eleven women live at The Bird’s Nest, a tiny-house village in East Texas, a remote spot where the hay bales look as big as school buses and roads have numbers instead of names. The women, nine of whom are retired and range in age from about 60 to 80 years old, share the explicit goal of keeping one another company into old age, possibly until death. The Bird’s Nest declares itself a women-only community, and the inhabitants broadly agree that, at this age, women are easier long-term companions than men.
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Most of The Bird’s Nest women are single — as are half of American women 65 and older. Most are also divorced, one has never been married and one, a widow, has “the perfect relationship” with a man who lives out of state. Among them, they have 21 children and two dozen grandchildren who are scattered across the country from Washington State to Arkansas. Nine dogs live on the property: “our babies,” they call them. For a while, the women kept a turkey named Turk, a goose named Mother and three ducks. But over time, they found they couldn’t keep up with the poop. When Turk developed an aggressive streak, they decided the birds had to go.
“I loved that turkey,” said Robyn Yerian, wistfully.
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Yerian is The Bird’s Nest property owner, a 70-year-old extrovert with cropped, bleached hair and a cheerful demeanor. I was sitting with her and her neighbors in “the kitchen” at The Bird’s Nest, which is not a kitchen at all but a large, open-air portico that functions as a community lounge. Strung with twinkle lights and dangling with ceiling fans and painted signs — “Like a Band of Gypsies We Go Down the Highway” — it’s where the women gather to eat, chat and play cards late into the night. Nearby, raised vegetable beds were bursting with zucchini. The mobile tiny houses, some encircled with sunflowers, resembled fairy-tale abodes.
Who made the decision to get rid of the birds? I asked.
The others chimed in. In addition to making a mess, the birds were antagonizing the dogs and, sometimes, the people.
