WHEN FEATHERS FALL
The coming of autumn brings molting birds, full of stress and anxiety.
BY MARISSA KING
When the days start getting shorter, you may walk out to your coop to find feathers everywhere! Worried, you take a head count and find no one is missing. There are a ton of feathers and you notice a few of your birds are bald. You think to yourself: “Surely a predator did this!”
While a predator could be likely, what is also likely is that your flock has begun their yearly molt. Now this is a little overdramatized, but right at 18 months of age, a flock will lose a majority of its feathers over an 8-week period. After this first molt, it’ll continue annually. New feather growth can take up to 16 weeks to complete.
Molting looks different on every bird. There are many factors that play a role in how a bird molts and how quickly they bounce back from it. The first sign that molting has started is a bird’s feathers start to look dull. They don’t have that sheen on them anymore.
After that point, you can have a chicken that goes through a hard molt and blows off all their feathers at once. These chickens look bald. You can also have a bird you hardly notice is molting — with an old feather here, a new feather there. You’ll especially notice roosters because some tend to lose their tails during molt. Molting starts with the head and works its way down to the tail feathers.
GROWING FEATHERS INSTEAD OF LAYING EGGS
During a molt, birds are regrowing their feathers. An old feather falls out and is replaced with a pin feather. This pin feather is covered in a protein sheath. As the feather grows, the sheath falls off.
You’ll notice a few things happening with your flock during a molt other than the multitude of feathers. Egg production will drop off tremendously, and you may not even get any eggs at all. Molting and the combination of lost sunlight are factors that play into the sudden decrease of eggs. Molting chickens have to conserve their nutrient reserves. Growing those feathers and the protein sheaths is a lot of work!