In her comprehensive guide to all things chicken, The Chicken Encyclopedia, Gail Damerow notes that molting, “the periodic shedding and renewal of feathers,” is an annual event that occurs over a period of weeks, usually when the days grow shorter.
My limited experience with chicken keeping has shown that to be true. We found ourselves cleaning up plenty of discarded feathers in late 2012 and again in the fall of 2013, as our hens went through the perfectly normal but painful-to-watch ritual of acquiring a whole new wardrobe to get them through the winter months and beyond.
The experts agree that the molt, which can drag on for some time as the process of dropping feathers and growing new ones gradually spreads across a hen’s body, usually is completed or in its final stages by the time the really cold weather hits.
Unfortunately for her, no one told Hope, one of the two Rhode Island Reds in our flock of four hens.
Hope began molting about two weeks ago, when I found a telltale deposit of rust-colored feathers in the coop one morning. Since then, she has grown progressively more ragged, losing additional feathers on her neck, wings, legs and fanny. It's as if a very hungry thief began plucking her while she was still alive, then thought better of it and put her back in the coop.
Anyone who has seen the same chicken before and during a molt realizes that a hen is, in large part, feathers. Hope is suddenly a lot thinner, and even a bit smaller, than her fully feathered self.
The tips of her new feathers, known as pin feathers because they are rolled up tight and look like pins when they first poke through the skin, are coming in. But it’s a slow process and Hope obviously feels vulnerable. She's only a year old, so this is her first molt as an adult hen. Maybe the novelty of it makes it more traumatic than the repeat performances that come later?
Fortunately, it has not been horribly frigid here in central Maine since Hope’s molt began, so I don’t think she's especially cold. She's not bald, after all. But she is getting picked on sporadically by at least one of the other “girls.” Damerow explains that pin feathers contain a blood supply, to promote continued growth in the feathers, and other chickens sometimes engage in cannibalistic picking, to try to get at the blood in the pins. Once the new feathers are fully developed, the body will shut off the blood supply to them, and the other hens will lose interest.
Hope seems to be holding her own, though. She has no pecking wounds. She has stopped or slowed her laying, but that’s normal. Feathers, like eggs, are protein. A hen cannot consume and process enough protein to crank out feathers and lots of eggs simultaneously.
Thanks to her travails, Hope is reluctant to get up in the morning these days. So I have to nudge her off the roost, out of the coop and into the pen when I clean the coop at dawn. But she eagerly joins the other three hens for their late-morning snack of mealworms (a good source of protein), as well as their mid-afternoon snack of yogurt, oatmeal and lettuce.
So, why the poor timing? Why didn’t Hope molt last autumn?
Chickens come equipped with their own set of mysteries. This may well be one of them. When I posted a query on an online message board asking other chicken keepers about Hope’s late molt, one of the people who responded said most of her “girls” are done molting now but two of them just started doing so. Hens are individuals, after all. As that woman noted in her reply to my post: “Each bird is different.”
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