Hen Chronicles: For our chickens, the makeover continues

Julie Gauthier and Rob Ludlow report in their book, Chicken Health For Dummies, that a chicken has between 7,500 and 9,000 feathers. I’ll take their word for it, but lately, it seems like a gross understatement.

Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds, began molting two months ago, and they’re still going at it. Countless discarded feathers materialize in the pen every day, and more turn up in the coop every night. The process has waxed and waned since it began in early September, but this annual ritual doesn't come to a complete stop until it’s over. New feathers emerge to replace the old ones in a spotty, unsightly, time-consuming exercise.

Judging by the largely refeathered state of “the girls,” I’d guess their molts will continue for at least another month. Gauthier and Ludlow note that a molt can last anywhere from six weeks to six months, “depending on the bird.” We’ve never seen a six-month molt, but three months or more is not at all uncommon.

The hens seemed put out when their old feathers began to drop. Their appetites took a hit, and they made their rounds gingerly, as if they were, well, walking on eggshells. But they recovered within a couple of weeks, and are now eating well and behaving normally.

We still aren’t handling them, though, because they dislike being picked up while molting. In fact, it can be dangerous to do so. The emerging “pin feathers” poke through the skin encased in temporary shafts that contain blood. Break a pin feather or two before the new feathers open and significant bleeding can result.

In the end, it will have been worth the wait. Nellie and Hope will look fresh and renewed, with a slight alteration in the coloring and patterns of their feathers. Their makeover will leave them better-equipped to cope with the falling temperatures, albeit not as quickly and easily as ordering a new winter coat from L.L. Bean would have done.

Hen Chronicles: And so, the annual feather toss begins

I found five rust-red feathers in the coop this morning, after our two Rhode Island Red hens, Nellie and Hope, sauntered out into the pen for breakfast.

Chickens lose the occasional feather throughout the year, so today's discovery is no big deal, in and of itself. But with autumn right around the corner, this was no isolated incident. One of the hens has begun her annual molt, which involves discarding old feathers to make room for a new set of duds.

Eyeballing the hens this morning, both of them still appeared to be fully feathered, but that means nothing. The loss of a few feathers would not be immediately apparent on a chicken. More telling was the fact that Nellie now has one feather on her back that’s askew. It points upward instead of resting flat, which probably means it will fall out soon.

So Nellie is molting. With any luck, Hope won’t be far behind, although the timing of such things can be unpredictable. The main question now is whether Nellie will have a soft molt, which would drag on slowly over a period of months, or a hard molt, in which all of the feathers would fall out almost simultaneously and be replaced in short order.

Nellie recently stopped laying, which may have happened because the days are growing shorter or because she felt a molt coming on. None of the hens we’ve owned over the last six years has laid any eggs while molting. Overall, though, the hens seem to take molting in stride, with little change in their behavior.

Just don’t touch them while the process is underway. As old feathers drop like leaves in an October breeze and countless new “pin feathers” poke through the skin, physical contact with anyone is the farthest thing from a chicken’s mind. Hands off is the guiding principle, for reasons that, at least to the molting chicken, seem perfectly obvious.

Hen Chronicles: A hard molt is fast, but it sure ain't pretty

I really hate the molt. I know it’s an annual ritual for chickens, allowing them to shed their old, dirty, worn out feathers and make way for new ones. But it isn’t pleasant to watch. And it can't be much fun to experience either.

Snow, our Plymouth Rock, began a soft molt in mid July, and it isn’t done yet. In a soft molt, a chicken loses feathers slowly over a long period of time. It can take up to four months, in fact. So although Snow is now in her third month of dropping feathers and producing new ones, she hasn’t developed any bald spots.

Hope, on the other hand, began a hard molt about a week ago. A hard molt doesn’t take as long, because the feathers fall fast and furious. Hope is a Rhode Island Red, so every day, I find dozens of dark red feathers in the coop and dozens more out in the pen. Any movement on her part sends feathers flying. The skin on her neck is now exposed, although it bristles with pin feathers. These are new feathers that initially resemble fat pins because they poke through the skin all rolled up. The poor thing looks like a well-used pincushion.

It’s hard to say, from observation, how much this process bothers a hen. In my experience, molting hens continue to go about their business, although they stop laying and may suffer some loss of appetite. They shy away from being touched, either by humans or other chickens, which is perfectly understandable.

It’s obviously not a process to be envied. Yes, the end result is impressive because the chicken gradually dons a new set of fresh, spiffy duds. But you and I can change clothes in a matter of minutes. If we had to disassemble our pants in order to remove them, and then stitch together a new pair as we pulled them on, would we even bother?

Hen Chronicles: I'm calling it "moltus interruptus"

If I’ve learned anything since we began keeping hens more than five years ago, it’s that there are few hard and fast rules that apply to all chickens in all situations.

Take the molt, when chickens replace old feathers with new ones. Mature birds molt once a year, according to the experts, normally in late summer or autumn. That being said, we once had a chicken skip a year. Another current member of our tiny flock — Hope, a Rhode Island Red — once began molting in February, which isn’t the best time of year to lose your feathers. But she did, and lived to cluck the tale. Usually, the hens molt at different times, but last year, they all molted in unison.

There also are different types of molts. In the case of a so-called hard molt, a chicken loses all of its feathers pretty much simultaneously, so the hen looks like hell for a while but the whole thing is over fairly quickly. In a soft molt, the process is gradual, so it takes a long time but the bird doesn’t look like, well, a plucked chicken.

Only one of our three hens — Snow, a Plymouth Rock —  is molting right now. She’s obviously having a soft molt, because the process started about two months ago and continued, unabated, for weeks, with white feathers flying all over the place but no visible patches of bare skin. Then the molt stopped as suddenly as it began.

A couple of weeks passed without the sight of additional feathers littering coop and pen. So I figured Snow was done molting for the year. I was wrong, thanks to a brand new phenomenon (for us anyway) that I have dubbed moltus interruptus.

A few days ago, following that two-week hiatus, Snow started tossing feathers left and right all over again. Near as I can tell, most of her body is now newly refeathered as a result of the first round of molting. But her tail is getting smaller and scruffier by the day in this second round.

So why was there an unprecedented break in Snow's molt? I have no idea.

Scientists have determined that the chicken is the closest living relative of the T. rex. (Skeptical? Look it up.) I wonder if that fearsome creature had more predictable habits than its diminutive modern-day cousin.

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.

Hen Chronicles: Some chickens cope better than others

Before Liz and I began keeping chickens, I never would have thought that they are feathered bundles of personal quirks. But so it is.

I mentioned in this space a while back that our Plymouth Rock, Snow, was molting. She still is, and although new feathers are coming in here, old feathers continue to drop off there, making her look, for the moment, like something Dr. Frankenstein created when he needed a break from working on you know what.

Now Snow has been joined by Hope, one of our Rhode Island Reds. But unlike Snow, whose molt is painfully obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes, Hope’s molt has been much more subdued so far. In fact, the only sign that she’s molting is that she has lost almost all of her tail feathers. The rest of her looks just fine.

Yet despite the fact that Snow is having a much harder time of it than Hope, Snow has maintained her voracious and insatiable appetite throughout her ordeal. Hope, a more sensitive and less flexible soul who's stuck at the bottom of the pecking order, began to show less interest in food as soon as that first tail feather broke free.

In fact, Hope’s appetite fell off so dramatically at the outset that, for one day, she even turned up her beak when offered mealworm, which, to a chicken, is like manna from heaven. Imagine a small child running away from an approaching ice-cream truck on a hot August afternoon and you’ll have some understanding of Hope’s behavior.

Hope’s appetite has improved since then, perhaps because she has adjusted to what is happening to her. Still, her behavior in this situation provides a clear reminder that all of us have individual personalities, whether we are people, or dogs, or cats or — yes — even chickens. 

Hen Chronicles: And a time to every purpose under heaven

This isn’t what The Byrds had in mind when they told us, in lyrics that Pete Seeger adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes, that there is “a time to every purpose under heaven.” But it applies nonethless.

The molt is upon us.

Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds, have not yet begun the annual ritual of dropping their feathers to make way for new ones. But Snow, our white Plymouth Rock, is losing feathers at what we would fear is an alarming rate if we had not seen it happen before.

Every morning for the past few days, I’ve found a coating of feathers atop the pine shavings in the coop. The process continues out in the pen throughout the day, creating the impression from a distance that a mysterious snow storm has come and gone in the pen while leaving the surrounding terrain completely untouched.

Snow is starting to look disheveled — her tail has all but disappeared in the blizzard of discarded feathers. But a mature chicken has an estimated 8,000 feathers, give or take, so Snow is far from bald. Chickens have either a hard molt, when they lose and replace all of their feathers quickly, or a soft molt, when the feathers drop and regrow gradually, and Snow normally has a soft molt. So we’re hoping history will repeat itself. We’ve seen the alternative; it ain’t pretty.

Not surprisingly, the normally bossy and energetic Snow is somewhat subdued these days. She stopped laying shortly before her molt began, which is not unusual. I have the sense, from personal observation, that molting is not so much painful as uncomfortable, especially when the new, tightly rolled pin feathers begin to poke through the skin. So we have to cut her some slack.

If the past is any measure, Snow will emerge from this experience brilliantly white, as if bleached, the somewhat faded old feathers having been replaced with a spiffy new set of clothes. It will take a few weeks for her to get there, but we’re looking forward to her "rebirth." No doubt she too, in her own way, is even more eager to get through this. And not for aesthetic reasons.

To everything (turn, turn, turn)

There is a season (turn, turn, turn)

And a time to every purpose, under heaven.

Hen Chronicles: The molt nears an end . . . well, almost

This year’s molt is about 66 percent complete in our tiny flock. What I mean by that is two of our three hens -- Snow, a Plymouth Rock, and Hope, a Rhode Island Red -- are almost fully feathered once again. But our third chicken — Nellie, a Rhode Island Red — still has a long way to go before she finishes doffing her old feathers and donning new ones.

Nellie was the last of the three to molt this year, and she only began doing so about two weeks ago. As a result, she now looks like she was assembled from scratch by a half-blind taxidermist using spare parts.

In some spots, all of Nellie's old feathers remain intact. In other places, some outer-layer red feathers have dropped off to reveal cream-colored feathers underneath that contrast sharply with her normal rusty coloring. Nellie has bare spots too, and areas where new pin feathers are coming in.

If Nellie were a jigsaw puzzle, you might wonder why some of the pieces are missing, and why other pieces appear to have been borrowed from an entirely different puzzle.

Fortunately for her, it has not been especially cold of late.

I spoke with a woman yesterday morning who keeps chickens. She said most of her hens have stopped molting, or are about to do so. They’re eating more now, and their mood has improved. When they’re molting, she said, “they get very cranky.”

Don't I know it. I can't blame them, though. I'd be damn cranky too if it took me a month or more to change my clothes.

Hen Chronicles: Mastering the molt?

Liz and I love all three of our hens, but Hope, a Rhode Island Red, is the only one of them who could accurately be described as sweet.

Hope is at the bottom of the pecking order. She’s the smallest member of the trio. She seems to be constantly on the alert for predators, real or imagined, and she’s the only one of our hens who routinely makes the high-pitched trilling sound of a frightened chicken. Hope is timid and shy, except when someone (i.e., me) is foolish enough to try to move her out of the nest box, a mistake I made only once. (I still recall the pain from the nasty peck she gave my hand that day, way back when.)

Not surprisingly, fearful, skittish Hope seems to take it especially hard when she starts to molt, as she is doing now. Dropping old feathers while new ones poke their way through your skin has to be uncomfortable, at  the very least, for any chicken. But Snow and Nellie, our other hens, take it pretty much in stride, going about their business as if there’s nothing remotely cartoonish about a chicken whose feathers fly off in her wake.

Hope has long been the last one to leave the coop in the morning, but since she started molting, she’s been reluctant to even get out of bed. For the last two weeks or so, while Snow and Nellie were in the pen pecking away at breakfast, I’ve had to nudge Hope by gently tapping her wing, just to get her off the roost and through the door. Once outside, she would hunker down, motionless, with her head pulled into her neck.

Until Monday.

Hope still needed some persuading to get up that morning, but she quickly abandoned her chicken-as-a-statue pose by walking around in the pen and nibbling at the feed. Then, on Tuesday, an even bigger breakthrough. For the first time in weeks, Hope got up on her own at dawn, and eagerly trotted down the ramp to the pen, right on the heels of Snow and Nellie. She even flapped her wings, which I interpret as a combination morning stretch and proclamation: “Here I am, world.”

Perhaps Hope is starting to come to terms with her latest change of clothing. She’s got quite a ways to go yet before the process is complete, but at least she’s off to a better start than she was in 2014. Last year, Hope did not even begin molting until mid January, so she was half-dressed during the coldest part of the winter.

Timing may not be everything, but when it comes to the molt, it counts for a lot. It may even provide — dare I say it? —hope for a sweet little hen who could use a break.

Hen Chronicles: For our hen Snow, the molt progresses apace

The aptly named Snow (our white Plymouth Rock hen) is creating her own blizzard in the pen now that she's molting, as you can see from this photo taken yesterday afternoon. All that white stuff on the ground? Yup. Feathers.

Snow has been molting for about a week now. She has sizable bare spots and is noticeably smaller than usual, a reminder that feathers account for much of a chicken's presumed size. Snow looks rather shabby up close, especially on her neck, wings and tail. (In fact, she insisted on no closeups. What? You didn't know chickens are vain?) The good news is that her baldness is patchy and new pin feathers are coming in. Nellie and Hope, the Rhode Island Reds, have not begun to molt . . . yet.

I wonder how chickens feel when they molt? They often shy away from physical contact with humans or other chickens, which is understandable considering their physical condition.

But what do they think? Are they taken aback by the molt, reacting with surprise each time it happens, as if it's a novel experience? Or do they realize, if they're old enough to have molted before, that it's just that time of year again? Maybe they give the process no thought at all, so long as everything else in their world -- food, shelter, companionship -- remains unchanged.

Hope, Snow and Nellie, wondering why The Treats Guy has a camera instead.

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.

Hen Chronicles: When hens turn into cartoon characters

Ah, the joys of watching a chicken molt.

Nellie, one of our Rhode Island Reds, now has a spotty covering of feathers as she goes through the process of casting off the old and bringing in the new. She’s fully "clothed" in some areas but shabby and balding in others, like someone emerging from a crazed barber's shop sporting the world’s worst haircut.

At dawn yesterday, Nellie pushed past the other hens when I opened the coop door, ran down to the pen and vigorously flapped her wings in what always strikes me as the chicken equivalent of a human's early-morning stretch. This caused a past-its-prime feather to fly off her body as if it had been shot into the air. The long, rust-colored feather floated lazily to the ground.

For that brief moment, Nellie looked quite cartoonish, like a frightened hen in a comic strip, scattering feathers in its wake as it scurries to evade some imaginary predator.

Hen Chronicles: At long last, the molt has begun

One of our three hens -- the attention-loving Plymouth Rock, Snow, who often seems to be the focus of these posts -- is molting.

Now, I know a thing or two about molting. It's the periodic discarding of old feathers to make way for new ones. Having kept chickens for more than two years, I've seen plenty of it. I realize it's normal, it's healthy and it happens every year or so, usually when the days grow shorter. A hen will stop laying while moulting, and she may shy away from the other chickens, to avoid being touched or bumped. But there's nothing remotely worrisome about the process.

If it's a "soft molt," the chicken may not even develop bald stops, or at least not very many of them. If it's a "hard molt," you're going to have a seemingly plucked, pathetic-looking chicken on your hands for weeks. Either way, it's what chickens do. The fresh feathers are cleaner and more lustrous than the old ones, and the "new" chicken ends up looking prettier and spiffier than before.

And yet, when I went out to the coop the other day and found dozens of white feathers scattered all over the pen, I held my breath for a fraction of a second. Maybe the subconscious mind asks itself, at the sight of so much chicken "clothing" blanketing the ground, what has gone wrong. Even though the conscious mind knows perfectly well that the answer is this: nothing at all.

Hen Chronicles: Hope molts, but turns a corner

Several weeks ago, I mentioned in this space that Hope, one of our Rhode Island Reds, was molting. She still is. Many new feathers have grown in, but she remains a slimmer version of her normal self because the process is not complete.

Yet one thing is clear: Hope has turned a corner.

When last I mentioned that Hope was losing feathers, new “pin feathers” - so-called because they are rolled up tight and look like pins when they first emerge - were poking through the skin on her neck. Well, those feathers have matured, as has some new plumage elsewhere on her body. Hope looks a lot better these days. But what’s equally important is that she obviously feels better too.

Hope and Nellie
last May, as pullets

Gone are the days when a balding Hope was timid and nervous around the other three hens, none of whom is molting. Back then, Hope was reluctant to leave the coop with the rest of the flock in the morning. I had to nudge her off the roost and out into the pen every day, so I could clean the coop.

No more.

For the past few days, as more and more feathers have filled in, Hope has run out into the pen on her own initiative at dawn, tagging along after Snow, Nala and Nellie. She muscles in now to get her share of the grub. She is perkier, and appears happier, than she has for quite some time. The vulnerable, apprehensive quality that had her scurrying away from the other hens, or hiding by herself in the coop, is a thing of the past.

Saturday offered further evidence of this welcome transformation. As dusk began to settle that afternoon, I went out to the coop to lock “the girls” in for the night. They head into the coop by themselves as darkness approaches, so usually, all I have to do is close and latch the door, to keep them safe from predators until I release them at dawn.
 
Not this time. Sure enough, Snow, Nala and Nellie were roosting in the coop. But the newly revived Hope was still roaming around the slowly darkening pen, presumably in search of one last bedtime snack before she called it a night.

There wasn’t much point in trying to force her into the coop. I knew she would go in on her own eventually. So I headed back to the house for 15 minutes before making another foray. Yet Hope was still in the pen. And this time she was squawking loudly, probably to protest the dearth of treats. So loudly, in fact, that the racket prompted Nala to abandon her perch in the coop and run back out into the pen to investigate the ruckus.

I trudged back to the house yet again, to wait a bit longer. Hope, and Nala, finally went to bed a few minutes later.

Researchers say chickens, like humans, have rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which means they can dream. Perhaps Hope, in her sleep that night, conjured up a world in which she finally rose to the top of the pecking order in our little flock. All in keeping with her newfound self-confidence.

Hen Chronicles: A poorly timed winter molt for Hope

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.” 

Hen Chronicles: Suffering through the molt takes patience

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.
 

Nala, before she lost her clothes

Molting is predictable and recurring and beneficial. But it sure ain’t pretty.

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.

Hen Chronicles: Molting takes a strange turn

The day-to-day task of caring for our four hens is fairly predictable. Chickens are creatures of habit. “The girls” rise at the crack of dawn, immediately wolf down their breakfast and then strut around their pen all day in search of wayward worms and other delicacies. They lay their eggs in their nest boxes, hop up and down with joy whenever someone shows up with snacks, and troop back into the coop at night to roost.

So I was taken aback by the novelty of what I saw the other day when I showed up at the pen with a late-morning treat of mealworms, kale and late-season raspberries from our garden. But more on that in a minute.

Snow, our Plymouth Rock, is molting. This is a normal, supposedly annual, process during which a chicken loses some, most or all of its feathers and grows new ones. It isn’t pretty, especially if a hen’s neck or butt goes bare almost overnight, but such is life on Planet Chicken.

As a result of Snow’s molt, the pen is littered with white feathers whose shelf life has expired. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing this of late, but the molt took an unusual turn on the day in question when I popped out to the pen with those snacks that I mentioned earlier.

Sure enough, a smattering of white feathers covered the ground in the pen. No surprise there. All four hens clucked, squawked and jumped excitedly as they awaited their treats. Nothing out of the ordinary there either. But then I noticed that Nala, our Barred Rock, had donned a new accessory.

Nala is not molting. She remains fully feathered. Her feathers have alternating black and white bands, so there’s no mistaking her for the all-white Snow. That’s why the long, brilliantly white feather that pointed skyward from her bum was so eye-catching. She looked like a comical excuse for a peacock, with a lone feather in her display, and a monochromatic one at that. (No, I didn't have a camera.)

God only knows how one of Snow’s discards affixed itself to Nala’s nether regions. My guess is that a stray bit of poop may have doubled as an adhesive. But I didn’t go in for a closer look to test my theory. Curiosity has its limits.

Snow and Nala (before Nala started wearing Snow's "clothes.")

Hen Chronicles: For Nala, the molt comes to an end

For a while, there, I wasn’t sure I’d live to see it: Nala, our Barred Rock hen, fully feathered once again.

When Nala went into her molt several weeks ago, I wasn’t exactly shocked. I’d read up on this annual denuding of chickens, which occurs when they lose their feathers, usually in the fall. But I was appalled nonetheless, partly because I’d never seen a chicken molt before and partly because our other hens - Snow and Stella - were not going through this indignity . . . yet.

First, Nala’s fanny feathers fell out - all of them - leaving her with a bare tush. Then, just as tiny new butt feathers began to emerge, her neck went bare. As feathers fell from a wing or her breast, new ones popped out on her head or her back.

She looked like a stuffed toy that had been partially destroyed by a roughhousing terrier, and she obviously was uncomfortable, shying away from the other hens and peering up at her humans as if she expected us to set things right.

But now, as the truly cold weather begins to set in, Nala is her old self once again. Or, I should say, her old self clad in brand new togs, to keep her warm during the months ahead. She’s fluffy and beautiful, with no bare spots and a renewed sense of self-confidence. 

Hen Chronicles: My first molt (well, not mine, exactly)

Nala, our beautiful Barred Rock hen, began littering the coop and pen with fanny feathers a few weeks ago, until her backside was completely bare.

The dreaded molt had begun. 
We’ve only had our girls since April and chickens generally molt in the late summer or early fall. So although I had read about this annual ritual, seeing a molt in the flesh - quite literally, when you’re staring at a chicken with a bald butt - is something else entirely.

The Chicken Encyclopedia, by Gail Damerow, defines a molt as “the periodic shedding and renewal of feathers.” Damerow writes, as do other experts, that the molt occurs “in a specific sequence, starting at the head and neck and gradually working toward the tail.”

One thing I’ve learned during my six months of chicken parenthood is that hens sometimes ignore the claims of experts, probably because chickens can’t read so they don’t know what is expected of them. In Nala’s case, for example, it was the fanny feathers that dropped out first.

Initially, being a fretter, I worried that Nala’s reversal of the normal molting sequence meant this was no ordinary molt, and that something was amiss. It didn’t help matters any that Nala’s personality changed during all this. (Yes, chickens do have individual personalities.) She seemed distracted and a bit dazed, staring up at me with a confused look in her eye whenever I checked on her.

Thus began the fanny watch.

Every day I scrutinized Nala’s butt (from a distance, I might add) hoping to spot the telltale signs of emerging feathers, but there were none.

Then, finally, after a week or so, neat rows of bluish-black “quills” appeared on her bum. Except that they weren’t really quills at all, but rolled up feathers that were not long enough yet to open up. The aforementioned experts write that emerging feathers look like porcupine quills until they expand, so I finally knew Nala was on the right track.

For whatever reason, Snow and Stella, the other hens, have shown no signs of molting so far. Maybe they’re on a delayed schedule, or maybe they’re somewhat younger than Nala, and so are not old enough to start molting yet.

The latter would be fine by me. I’ve read that a chicken has something like 8,500 feathers, so Nala may have a ways to go yet before she’s fully decked out in her new duds. At least she won’t be running around with a bare bottom that made her look (heaven forbid) like she was ready for the oven.