Blue-Legs the hen was one of the last girls to start molting. In fact, we weren’t sure she was even going to, based on how much later she started than everyone else. Then we started finding little piles of Blue-Legs feathers in the barn, which, while disconcerting, let us know she was just on a different schedule from the other girls. As I mentioned before, the don’t all fall out at once; rather, a patch will fall out and regrow, then another patch. Blue-Legs’ neck feathers (the last bare patches) are finally growing in now. The new feathers are initially enclosed in shafts, which reminds me of a character from an old horror movie called Nightbreed, but I digress. Soon, Blue-Legs will look all shiny and sleek, but for now she looks like she’s having a perpetual bad feather day:
One has to wonder what joke mother nature was playing when she thought molting in winter was a good idea.
Agreed. The logic is completely beyond me, too