We’ve had our share of warm weather here in central Maine this winter, not to mention relatively little snow, all of which makes for happy chickens. Now our three hens are providing still more evidence that this has not been the winter of their discontent.
The outdoor "dust bath" is back.
One day last week, and again yesterday, Snow, Nellie and Hope dug shallow pits in the soil of their pen, plopped themselves down in them, and then thrashed around for a good long while, using their feet and wings to toss sand and dirt into the air and all over their bodies.
To the uninitiated, it might have looked as if they were having seizures. In fact, this is a popular, and healthy, pastime that we see on a regular basis during the summer, but rarely at this time of the year.
In The Chicken Encyclopedia, expert Gail Damerow writes that chickens “work dust through their feathers” during this process, to control parasites. “When a chicken is done dusting, it typically stands up and shakes itself off, then preens.”
Last February, “the girls” used the pine shavings in their coop as a substitute for the traditional outdoor dust bath, because the ground in the pen remained too frozen for them to “bathe” in it.
Not so, this year.
Dust-bathing chickens “seem very happy when doing this,” note the authors of Keeping Chickens For Dummies, “so it must feel good.”
Happy indeed. A blissful chicken flopping around in loose dirt, seemingly oblivious to its surroundings, looks about as content as a pig in . . . . Well, you know.
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