Holy Molting Chickens, Batman!

The past few days Skee, our Araucana, has been dropping feathers all over the place. Yesterday it looked like someone had shaken a pillow open all over the back stairs. Today, when letting the girls out, I opened the coop to find a pile of feathers on the floor.

It looked like someone had taken part of that same pillow and decorated the coop with it.

I decided that it would be a good idea to hunt Skee down and check her out. She hasn’t laid for a week and a half, so we assumed she was going to go through a doozy of a molt.  I know that this is around the time of year that most chickens molt, but since neither of our red sexlinks did last year, and Skee was too young, I wasn’t really expecting it. I really wasn’t expecting to see her with a pretty decent sized bald patch.

The picture doesn’t really do it justice. The patch itself it about the size of a softball. The skin isn’t red, and everything seems fine. I’m not sure how long it will take to grow in. I’m just thankful that she’s large enough that she can take care of herself now. (For those who don’t remember, Skee was adopted after we got Louise and Edith. She was a peckee. You can read her tale here.) I do have to say, I found myself a bit worried about the entire thing, as the last time I saw this much bald on a chicken it wasn’t for a healthy reason. After taking a look in Jenna Woginrich’s Chick Days, I felt a bit more confident in the situation and was happy feeding them a bit of Ashes’ food. While he wasn’t too happy with me for sharing with the chickens, you can see that they seemed to enjoy it.

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