Happy Saturday!
It’s only the second day of summer, and I have three girls molting, as follows:
• 2 year old Buckeye - I expected this molt, as we put her on hormones to give her oviduct a break (she had swelling and a mass)
• 3 year old Buff Orpington - This is my broody, who just finished her fourth week of raising store-bought chicks. Can stress of motherhood trigger molt? She’s great, otherwise.
• 2 year old Speckled Sussex - I just treated this one for a crop issue. Easy to treat. I suspected she might have been eating feathers, which caused a crop problem in a different hen last year. It’s possible this is just one of those mini molts that sometimes hits before the real molt. Can’t tell yet.
The weather has been very strange for California this spring. Could that be a factor? I thought molting cycle tended to be regulated by sunlight, which is not affected by the weather. Could the addition of the three chicks be causing stress? It seems less stressful than if I had hand raised them and integrated them later.
Starting my fourth year of keeping chickens, this is by far the earliest molting I’ve seen. Last year I had one start in early August, but that seemed to have been triggered by an illness. (Based on her body language and behavior, I thought she had an oviduct infection. It’s possible she’s just a really big weenie about molt and her pain was from that, but she sure seemed sick, and nobody on the forums had seen her body language before, except with oviduct infection, if I recall correctly.)
Thanks for taking the time to read and share your thoughts.
Edited to add: I forgot to ask... can molting be “contagious?” Obviously I don’t mean actually contagious, but can their hormone changes rub off on each other? Like when women live together, they sometimes get on the same cycle?
It’s only the second day of summer, and I have three girls molting, as follows:
• 2 year old Buckeye - I expected this molt, as we put her on hormones to give her oviduct a break (she had swelling and a mass)
• 3 year old Buff Orpington - This is my broody, who just finished her fourth week of raising store-bought chicks. Can stress of motherhood trigger molt? She’s great, otherwise.
• 2 year old Speckled Sussex - I just treated this one for a crop issue. Easy to treat. I suspected she might have been eating feathers, which caused a crop problem in a different hen last year. It’s possible this is just one of those mini molts that sometimes hits before the real molt. Can’t tell yet.
The weather has been very strange for California this spring. Could that be a factor? I thought molting cycle tended to be regulated by sunlight, which is not affected by the weather. Could the addition of the three chicks be causing stress? It seems less stressful than if I had hand raised them and integrated them later.
Starting my fourth year of keeping chickens, this is by far the earliest molting I’ve seen. Last year I had one start in early August, but that seemed to have been triggered by an illness. (Based on her body language and behavior, I thought she had an oviduct infection. It’s possible she’s just a really big weenie about molt and her pain was from that, but she sure seemed sick, and nobody on the forums had seen her body language before, except with oviduct infection, if I recall correctly.)
Thanks for taking the time to read and share your thoughts.
Edited to add: I forgot to ask... can molting be “contagious?” Obviously I don’t mean actually contagious, but can their hormone changes rub off on each other? Like when women live together, they sometimes get on the same cycle?
