Hen Chronicles: Featuring a fitful fluttering of falling feathers

It’s only mid October, and already the chicken pen is coated in white stuff.

No, not that white stuff. Feathers.

Snow, our all-white Plymouth Rock hen, has begun to molt.

The reference books can be somewhat misleading on the subject of molting. For one thing, it’s supposed to occur every year, as chickens discard old feathers to make way for new ones. And the experts claim that it progresses in an entirely predictable pattern, from the head down along the rest of the body, until the process is complete.

Neither has proven true in our experience. From what we’ve seen, a chicken's molting timetable can be erratic, sometimes allowing more than a year to pass between molts. And our hens obviously have not read the reference books, because they rarely begin molting from the head.

At least this time around, Snow is playing by the rules. Her biggest bald spot so far is on her neck. And she is molting when chickens are supposed to: as the days grow shorter. It can take weeks, even months, to complete a molt. So Snow’s current schedule is much more sensible, in terms of getting "refeathered" before the deep freeze, than what we saw last year, when one of our two Rhode Island Reds began molting in February.

Snow normally has a soft molt, which involves losing and replacing feathers over a long period of time, rather than a hard molt, when a chicken drops almost all of its feathers quickly. A hard molt leaves a chicken more naked-looking than a soft molt, so we're hoping Snow sticks to past practice.

Either way, our pen already looks like "the girls" have had a pillow fight; one in which they used Snow as the pillow.

Snow lost a lot of feathers over the last few days. This was the scene on Sunday, before I cleaned things up.