Chickens bottoms!!

[wortinguk]

Hi there,

I have two questions relating to my chickens bottoms.

1. My speckled sussex who is approx 7 months old and appears to be in very good health, has absolutely no feathers on her bottom
I have not seen an excess of feathers lying around and no evidence of the other hens attacking/picking on her
Currently she looks like a baboon
I have had a look at her and can find no evidence of mite or lice
I did wonder if this was part of her moult as some of my other hens have recently started to lay and she may be amongst them but difficult to tell who lays what

2. Another hen which was given to me recently has a very dirtly bottom - her feathers are very mucky and unpleasant looking
Obviously I want to clean this up before the weather warms up to avoid flystrike
Is it safe to wash hens bottoms and if so what is the best way to go about this

Thanks in advance
Sue in the UK

 

[Luke0987654321]

hen 1:

hens normally start molting from the head and down
hen 2: just fill the bason with warm water and just clean the muck out like if you had a bird poop on your head,

 

[3goodeggs]

I only had about seven hens out of 24 with baboon bottoms. I sat in the run for hours and discovered that I had a hen eating the feathers off of those chickens. I have decided that they are just more passive and are willing to endure it, while the other hens will wheel around and peck back. Keep an eye on the perfect feathered hens and see if they are nipping at the others.
Our 'solution' was to take the top hen and put her in a cage, separated from the rest. we will reintroduce her this week and see if it made any difference. The other thing we did was to switch from layer to flock raiser in case it has more to do with a protein need. They have eaten a lot more flock raiser in less time than the layer, so maybe it did.
We have one hen so passive that we have her in a dog crate next to the run during the day, and we put her in the coop to roost at night. She will be getting her own coop and run soon. I do not expect her to change. and I have too much effort in her to let her get eaten alive now.
On question two, I have no experience.
I do not know if our solution to question one is going to work either. It's all a mystery to us. We just keep trying things until something works.
Good luck with your hens.