Bare-bottom chicken

[steph]

Hi all!
It's been a while since I've posted. Last year we only had one adult chicken left from our original flock, and decided that adding pullets would be less work than baby chicks. We were connected with someone who raises chicken and got 5 pullets from him, who we added directly to the coop and the remaining adult and everything went great for a while. Then the pullets started dying. First, one seemed to stop growing, although everything else seemed normal. The others began to look more like chickens, and she stayed a pullet- then we lost her. Slowly, over the course of this past year, we lost 2 more, due to something that now I wonder might have been Marek's. Anyway, the remaining 2 from that group of 5 are seemingly healthy and good layers, but there is one weird thing I thought I'd ask about. One of them is a Copper Maran, and she has no feathers around her vent, in a largish area. At first I thought her vent was swollen and that's why it looked like that, but it isn't. Plus she reliably lays eggs, almost every day. Any ideas? Anything I should be concerned about?

 

[Corazon Ranch]

I can't fully answer your question, but I would bet that the feather loss is unrelated to the previous deaths (though that sounded so scary when I read it!).

A few of my birds have pulled out the feathers around their vents, too. I still don't know why! They have lots of space to roam, and quality feed plus alfalfa hay and treats. I'm starting to think it may have something to do with the heat (I live in the Chihuahuan desert), but it seems unlikely that you would have that problem in Oregon, right?

I'm going to keep an eye on this post to see if anyone can solve both our problems!

Good luck,
Sara