Don't Chu be takin' my feathers!- Agnes
Holy crap! My chickens look awful, but after days of worrying, force feeding them scraps, and imagining their imminent demise, I have learned that MOLTING is totally natural and normal. No one is dying. Everything is going to be fine.
Last week I first noticed that Cloella looked a little bare on her neck. Her feathers were actually gone in one spot and I couldn’t figure out why that might be as I hadn’t seen anyone else harassing her. I remember as a child the roosters in the chicken yard pulling the feathers out of the poor hens’ backs in their lascivious carnal enthusiasm. I always felt so sorry for the hens and often jumped in to give the rooster a kick in the name of feminism. In the peacefulness of our female-dominated hen house, however, you just don’t expect to see this sort of abuse (the hen, not me kicking nasty roosters). Upon further inspection, it was obvious that Agnes was losing feathers too, and so was Rosey! The only one not losing feathers is the barred rock Atilla. Anyway, I declared to our whole house that our chickens “must be hungry” and that we needed to start feeding them…. a lot. Usually my answer is that we all need more sleep, (Brad thinks this is hilarious how I can “cure” anything with more sleep) but this time it needed to be food. These poor chickens were featherless after all and here it is getting cold out!
A little internet research reassured me that the chickens are just molting and will replace their pretty little feathers in a month or so. Meanwhile, it isn’t a bad idea to feed them, but I need to be giving them protein. The webpage recommended hamburger. Protein? In this economy? Think I am going to go thaw out some of our primo organic beef for chickens so that they can grow their little pin feathers in a bit quicker? Think again! Actually, I did offer them some very past dated fish. They seemed to like it. Aren’t you glad we don’t molt?
Here are our chickens sometime in late September... full feathered
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Oh, they were so pretty fully feathered! I haven’t seen a photo in a while and they are quite beautiful… uh, WERE quite beautiful and they will be again! What an odd time to molt, wouldn’t it make more sense to do it in the summer when it’s hot out? Odd. And yes, I am SO glad that humans don’t molt! Glad you’re blogging!
October 23rd, 2008
I would think they would molt in the summer too, but there is some connection to less sunlight that kicks off the molting process. I worry that they are getting cold, but mostly I would like them to get this over with so that they LAY EGGS again!
October 23rd, 2008
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