Molting and twitchy/scared - unrelated?

[steveg144]

So our gal Camilla (a leghorn) has feathers all over the place, and is not laying. Looks otherwise healthy, and is eating etc, so I'm thinking she's molting. So far so good. But she's also developed this new behavior. She comes out of her coop for breakfast, has a few bites, then scurries back either under the tarp on her coop or inside the coop itself. She behaves exactly the way she'd behave if for instance she saw a hawk overhead etc. She then stays there ALL DAY. I'm wondering if twitchy/scared behavior is another side effect of molting, or if the two are unrelated? She may have some reality-based reason for fear; coyotes have been working their way into our county; yesterday our neighborhood's white peacock, who belongs to a friend of mine, was making such odd loud broken-clarinet cries out in my yard (he thinks he's a chick trapped in a peacock's body, so he visits Camilla often so weird that I ran out to see if he was hurt. His human tells me "yeah he makes sounds like that when there's something around he doesn't like."

 

[kreagerm]

For some reason during the molt, chickens can act odd and non sociable. This is normal and you have nothing to worry about.