Margot is starting to lose her feathers. They’re running thin on her undercarriage and now, when you pick her up, you can see they grey chickeny skin underneath.

Chickens moult once a year, and when it starts has nothing to do with the seasons: it’s age-related. That means plenty of unfortunate birds end up moulting in the middle of winter and have to spend half of the season strutting around in a shiver.

Fortunately she’s chosen spring time, and doubly fortunately we know what’s going on. Our neighbours’ daughter’s chickens weren’t so lucky. We were telling her about Margot’s disappearing feathers last night, stood on the drive, when she admitted that her daughter hadn’t known they did this once a year, and had killed two because she thought they must be diseased. They’ve learned from their mistake, of course.

Unfortunately, when they start to moult they also stop laying, and although we still are getting some three-egg days, we have had a smattering of two-eggs days in the mix, so I’m glad all three aren’t going at once or we could end up with no eggs at all.

They’ll all drop down over time, and eventually grow back, but that brings another problem: clipping. When the body feathers grow back, so do the wing feathers, and if we don’t want to risk them getting out and flying away, they’ll have to be trimmed.

Related posts:

1. More moulting
2. Our chickens are moulting heavily
3. We’re getting some new chickens