When Chickens Lose Their Feathers: Part II

If you haven't already, check out our blog post from last week all about why chickens and feather loss. This week, we're giving you more reasons why your chicken might be losing its feathers. 

Vent Gleet

Vent Gleet is a disease that can cause your chicken to loose feathers. It's a fungal infection in the chickens vent. You can prevent vent gleet by keeping their coops cleaning and feeding them good food and water.

Roosters

When roosters mate with hens, they hold onto the hens back with their beaks and it can lead to them pulling feathers out of the hens back and neck area. 

Stress

Much like humans and hair loss, chickens can lose their feathers due to stress. Chicken stress can come from molting, new birds in the flock, moving their coop, predators, pecking order and illness. All of these things add stress to your chickens, which can lead to feather loss.

Diet Changes

A change in diet can actually expedite molting before it's time. Sometimes farmers will purposely change their chickens diet so they will molt because molting increases quality of eggs, however, this practice is now illegal in most places.

Preening

Chickens will often do this to themselves by spreading the oil from their preen gland all over their back and on their feathers. They do this to remove feathers that are imperfect or unsightly.

Boredom

You know how sometimes people will pick at their nails or hair when they are bored? Well, same goes with chickens. If they don't have anything to do, they will pluck their own feathers!

Check back next week for part three in this series to find out what you can do to assist your chickens with the growth of new feathers! If you missed our blog post last week, you can read it here!