Feather Flurry

It has a way of creeping up on you. Maybe not for the barnyard fowl so much, but at least for their caretaker. First, the days grow noticeably shorter. Then the egg production slackens. Certainly, laying eggs is correlated with exposure to light, but this change seems fairly drastic. I chide the ladies for being pikers…and then I realize that molting season has arrived.
Feathers are nature’s most complex skin covering. Lightweight, insulating, and empowering flight, feathers are also a wonderful means of display. Made of collagen (like your fingernails), the material is lightweight, structurally strong, and colors well. Pigments offer tones in yellow, red, brown, and black, while blues and greens are caused by prisms in the feather itself reflecting and refracting light. Take a rooster’s emerald green tail plumage, remove it from direct sunlight, and it become simply a black feather.
Early feathers were not so fanciful as those on a chicken. Instead, they were much more like the coarse covering on a kiwi bird. As this new modified scale was honed, it formed into the wide range of feather types found today—primary flight feathers, downy feathers, water-repellant feathers, and display feathers. The airfoils on an airplane’s wings are modeled after feathers, and science has yet to produce any substance as insulating as goose down. The feathers of waterfowl are so naturally structured that, even when completely stripped of their oils, they still cause water to bead up and wick away.
But before you wish you could have been endowed with feathers to keep warm this autumn, know that this complex skin covering comes at a price. Even the most well-preened feather wears out from exposure to wind, sun, and use, and it has to be sloughed off and a new one grown in its place. This process is called molting.
While we shear our sheep in the spring so they don’t overheat in the warming temperatures (which gives them all summer to grow a fresh coat for autumn), poultry plan their molt at autumn’s approach in order to have fresh feathers for winter. Sounds like a good strategy, but as I watch them turn from sleek hens to a motley crew of dishevelment, I can’t help but feel that this is less than perfect timing with the chilly nights.
I know it has reached molting season when I open the coop door in the morning and am showered in a rolling cloud of disembodied, worn out feathers. They billow out in all directions, littering the coop floor and the yard outside. And my half-undressed ladies bob about looking like homeless drifters who have little care for appearances—a far cry from their summer vanity of careful preening and disgruntlement at having their feathers ruffled the wrong way. These days, they look as well kempt as a teenager’s bedroom.
But growing feathers takes considerable energy, with each new plume starting as a “pin feather” wrapped in a scaly sheath. This capsule is filled with blood as it forms the interlocking barbs and sturdy shaft of the feather. When the feather is ready to emerge, the scales of the pin shatter (creating rather a lot of dust in the coop), and the formed feather begins to elongate until it has reached its proper length. In the meantime, because of this taxing growth, hens often cease laying eggs until the molt is complete.
Commercial egg producers would butcher the hens at this age because the companies do not want to sustain the expense of feeding birds through a dry spell. But hens have many more years of giving eggs after their molt, so this industrial practice is quite wasteful of life. I’ve had distinctive hens live to 11 years old, enjoying the outdoors to the end.
As the molt continues, turkeys prance sheepishly, holding low their bunt tails. Patches are missing here and there, showing the wispy down beneath. The Toms often regret to offer their poofed display until at least some of their tail feathers return. The ducks show the least change (perhaps because ducks are endowed with ever so many more feathers—you know if you ever tried to pluck one). But their yard looks like a duck feather confetti party, so the secret is out.
Birds grow new feathers nearly all the time. Young birds graduate from their first chick plumage to adult-sized feathers. New feathers replace ones that have been damaged or pulled out by bossy comrades. But the molting process is the avian way of “changing the closet” for the coming of winter. No need to buy a down vest when you can grow one!
Yet even in the midst of molting season, I know that this too shall pass. The billowing feathers will settle, and my ladies will become sleek and vain once again—snug and warm for winter. In the meantime, it’s not avian mange; it’s just the annual molt. Let’s all be patient as the ladies work their wardrobe, knowing that eggs will be plentiful again later this fall. Here’s to happy, healthy hens all winter long! See you down on the farm sometime.