“Soon, the down lengthens and the shaft of the feathers erupts. “It is covered with down except for the wings and tail where some early feather growth is evident,” he says. “When a chick hatches, it has virtually no feathers,” writes Scott Beyer, an extension specialist in poultry science at Kansas State University, in “Molting and Other Causes of Feather Loss in Small Poultry Flocks.” However, no matter how often chickens molt, once they’ve gotten their adult feathers, their coloring doesn’t deviate from molt to molt.Īctually, chicks go through a couple of juvenile, or mini, molts on their way to being fully feathered. Ptarmigan take on snowy plumage to herald the onset of winter. A male cardinal is the well-known bright red while its mate is a much more demure blushing brown.
For example, immature bald eagles lack the distinctive white head they will gain as fully mature birds. Many birds not only gain fresh new feathers in their molt but also take on new patterns or colors, which can indicate age, sex or the time of year. This means that when they get damaged, feathers can’t heal themselves they have to be completely replaced.” In “The Basics: Feather Molt,” experts at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology say, “A feather is a ‘dead’ structure, analogous to hair or nails in humans and made of the same basic ingredient, the protein keratin. A little research indicated that our flock was molting, one and all.Īll birds molt, from the tiniest hummingbird to the biggest eagle. I suspected disease or mite infestation, but outside of looking like they’d been run through my granny’s wringer washer, they seemed healthy. “Moth-eaten” was a kind description of their appearance.Įgg production was virtually nil. Every day, they dropped feathers like confetti: head, neck, body. Then, their second winter hit, and just when I was rejoicing that they had all those fluffy feathers to protect them from the growing chill, they started to lose them.
By 6 months old, they were in full production, delighting us with a steady succession of deep-brown eggs, which continued with little drop in production into the next summer and autumn.
When our first batch of Barred Plymouth Rock chicks grew from little yellow puffballs to fully-fledged birds, they were a wonder of black and white feathers.