Hen Chronicles: Mopey molting moodiness multipled

Having kept chickens for more than four years now, Liz and I have seen our fair share of molting: the periodic process by which hens replace their old feathers with new ones. We’ve seen soft molts (gradual, over a long period of time). We’ve seen hard molts (quick, with a sudden, complete loss of feathers). We’ve even seen what I call missed molts, when a hen skips this supposedly annual ritual.

But we’d never seen all of our hens molt in unison.

Until this year.

Snow, our white Plymouth Rock, got things started a while back, followed in short order by Hope and then Nellie, our Rhode Island Reds. Thanks to her head start, Snow is now on the mend, as we think of it, with most of her new feathers already in place. But she’s still discarding old ones, albeit fewer than Nellie and Hope, who are not as far along in the process.

All of which makes for a sad sight. Snow no longer has visible pin feathers — the incoming feathers that look like fat pins until they fully emerge and unfurl. But she still looks somewhat bedraggled. Hope is in worse shape, but Nellie is the most pathetic-looking of the bunch. Her tail feathers have disappeared. Her back is covered with soon-to-be-discarded feathers that sometimes fly off when she walks. And her neck is a mass of emerging feathers, giving her the appearance of an ambulatory pin cushion. Liz and I joke that although we’re glad to know “the pins” are coming in, we really don’t want to see them.

The hens are cranky. No one is laying. Their appetites are off, although we’re now seeing some improvement on that score. This morning, Nellie chased Hope around the pen for no obvious reason, amid much aggrieved squawking from Hope. (“The girls” usually get along just fine). And the contented clucking that is the norm in our pen has been replaced by oddly plaintive sounds. I interpret them as the chicken equivalent of a disgruntled teenager’s lament that life sucks.

One consolation is that the molt will not be especially drawn out this time around because the hens are molting pretty much simultaneously, rather than in succession. And if all goes according to plan, everyone will be fully feathered by the time winter does its worst, which is the most important consideration of all.