Birds of a feather molt together!

    If you were to walk around the farm right now you would think one of two things has happened...
1) The world's largest pillow fight has happened right here on our farm... or 2) There was a HUGE chicken massacre, well with out all the blood and yucky stuff.

   But neither of these things are true, although the whole pillow fight thing sounds pretty fun. It's molting time, and all the chickens are molting. It's a sad sight indeed, chickens walking around looking like roadkill, and of course feathers EVERYWHERE!!!! There some over here,

 a few over there,

oh and don't forget over there...

                                          (Oh and we have Gunieas too..)
 and there..

and there...

Well you get the point I'm sure.

  For those of you who are not on the up and up of chickens, molting is when chickens shed more or less their old feathers to make way for new ones.Some may loose only a few here and there at a time, while others look like they were just mauled by some wild animal.

  Normally I tend to picture my hens as little, snooty, prim and proper Victorian Southern Belles, with their big puffy dresses and petticoats.Some of my girls even have hats! They strut around gracefully through the yard, stopping to gossip with one another. During molting time, they look more like bag ladies minus the shopping cart, still trying desperately to strut gracefully across the yard, while even the goats are laughing at them.

  One of the huge draw backs to molting, aside from the mess of feathers EVERYWHERE, believe me I can not stress everywhere enough, is that most chickens will stop laying entirely during their molt. Which means the only thing those hens are dropping,well besides you know what, is feathers!

  I seem to have been fortunate enough that not all my hens molt at the same time, so I don't go completely with out eggs, but it does mean that I have feathers coming out of the woo hooo for what seems like months.

  So what to do with all these feathers..... most of the time we would just rake them up and throw them away or into the compost pile, but after having several people ask for them we started gathering them up. Now I find myself walking around picking out the best feathers I can find and saving them for my crafty friends, or sometimes myself when I'm feeling pretty crafty. We have ducks too, so I have even begun to gather up their feathers as well. I have recently been asked for down feathers, so we walk around picking up all the fuzzy down feathers when can find. The kids call them hiney feathers, and that makes me laugh every time! Yea I know I'm easily entertained, you would be too if you spent your days with a 2 and four year old.

  For those of you chicken owners out there, I have been told there seems to be quite a market out there for feathers, especially fancy feathers. So while you're staring at all those feathers, why not gather a few up to do something crafty with, or give them to one of your crafty friends!  

  And remember ...Birds of a feather molt together!