One chick plucking anothers feathers

[Belladebi]

I have 3 Andalusians. One of them, Dandelion, is plucking the feathers, particularly the tail feathers, of one of the others-Midnight. I feel very bad for Midnight she has hardly any tail feathers left. When i take them out of the brooder Dandelion will fly at Midnight but not at our third chick. Midnight is also having a problem keeping one eye open. I was thinking dust may have gotten in it but now I'm thinking did Dandelion peck her in the eye! What should I do about the feather plucking?

 

[Momaha]

This is a small modified excerpt from the care sheet you can find at no charge on cacklehatchery.com:

There is an oil gland above the tail that provides the oil for their beacks to groom their feathers. New feathers are full of blood and if pulled out will bleed some and this can attract other birds to pick at this area. Bright lights can occasionally cause them to pick each other and changing to a red light might help if you haven't already done so. Birds picking each other can be caused by the stress from having lights on 24 hours a day. You don't mention how old the birds are but if they are no longer requiring a heat source remove the light source at noon and as the early evening comes around and it becomes darker the birds will automatically lay down by each other to go to sleep. Try not to disturb them during this time because it could make them pile up 2-3 deep on each other and smother. Treat the chicks that have been picked by smearing pine tar or menthol flavored ointment on the area injured and keep up the treatment until healed. Sometimes, they pick for no appearant reason.

Good luck!

 

[CAdreaming]

I don't know how much this will help since I am new to all this myself but...
We came home with 4 fluffy butts 2 months ago & were keeping them in one of those indoor rabbit cages... we thought it would be plenty of room but after a week (they really do grow quick!!!) I had the same thing going on that you do... one poor little chick (GC) was getting picked on by another- drawing blood & causing the other 2 to peck at it also. To protect the GC, I removed it from the cage but I didn't want the other chicks to look at this one as a stranger when they were finally ready to go outside so I took some short fencing & jimmy rigged a small caged in area, attached to the rabbit cage but divided by the cage wall. At night I would then place the GC back into the rabbit cage so it could sleep with the others. This seemed to work well so I wondered if it was a space issue (were the small fluffy butts feeling to confined in the cage) or did they just not like the GC that had been picked on. So every day, I would take out a different chick & place it in the homemade cage & see if anyone would pick on the GC. As long as there were only 3 in the rabbit cage, the GC never got picked on. Even though I thought it was enough space, the chicks obviously did not agree. All 4 are now back together outside in their large coop/pen & haven't given me a single issue.