When I lifted the roof of our chicken coop one morning two weeks ago to clean out the previous nights “offerings,” it looked like a fox had made off with Nala, leaving nothing behind but a mountain of feathers.
Fortunately, I knew that wasn’t the case. Our Barred Rock had hopped down into the pen with the other hens moments earlier, when I opened the coop door to let “the girls” out for the day.
No, this wasn’t the work of some chicken-loving varmint.
The dreaded molt was upon us.
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines molt as “to lose a covering of hair, feathers, etc., and replace it with new growth in the same place.” That sounds straightforward enough, but reading about molting and seeing it in action are two different things.
Chickens molt “at approximately one-year intervals,” usually during the late summer or early fall, according to The Chicken Encyclopedia, by Gail Damerow. Molting is “a natural process, not a disease,” says Raising Chickens for Dummies. The idea is that new feathers better protect a chicken during the cold-weather months.
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| Nala, before she lost her clothes |
Snow, our Plymouth Rock, has been going through a so-called “soft molt” this fall. “A soft molt means the feathers are lost and regrown gradually. Sometimes you may hardly notice a soft molt, except as a reduction in laying,” mypetchicken.com explains.
In Snow’s case, she lost a batch of feathers about a month ago, but only on isolated portions of her body. As a result, her plumage is now an odd mix of pristine new feathers, which are so brilliantly white that they look freshly bleached, and off-white old feathers. Her molt would not be obvious to the casual observer.
Nala is another story. She’s going through what mypetchicken.com calls a "hard molt," which means “all the feathers are lost almost at once so molting is over relatively quickly.”
When I peered into the coop that morning two weeks ago, the pine shavings on the floor were littered with what appeared to be hundreds of feathers. I knew they were Nala’s because the feathers had the distinctive alternating black and white bars of a Barred Rock, and Nala is our only Barred Rock. (In addition to the all-white Snow, we have two Rhode Island Reds who are- yup - red.)
That first day, Nala still looked like she was fully feathered, despite evidence to the contrary in the coop and in the pen. But that quickly changed. The following morning, the coop contained a new batch of black and white feathers, which I cleaned out. The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that, and every day for a week or more.
If garden gnomes were in the habit of buying tiny down pillows, we could have cornered the market.
Nala quickly went from fluffy to shabby to pathetic. Her bum was practically bald, her neck was bare and the plumage on the rest of her body could best be described as spotty. We could even see the partially exposed quills from some of her remaining wing feathers. She seemed to lose a tremendous amount of weight in a matter of days, although that was an illusion because a fully feathered chicken looks much bigger than it really is.
For several days, I held my breath. Nala lost more and more of her feathers, stopped laying eggs and shied away from any physical contact with the other hens. Finally, a week or so into the process, new feathers began to emerge, first on her neck and later elsewhere on her body. These "pin feathers" are tightly rolled and look like quills, until they finally open up to reveal that they are the real deal.
The experts say a molt can take weeks, even months. Nala continues to drop feathers, but nowhere near as many as she did during that first week. At this point, she looks like Frankenstein’s chicken, a partially bald creature assembled from spikes and other spare parts. But she becomes a bit more recognizable every day, thanks to Mother Nature’s remarkable mechanism for replacing old, discarded feathers with brand new ones.
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