Fuss and Feathers: Day Length, Molting and Egg Production in a Small Flock

We are nearly two years into raising our Flock-of-Four:
Amelia (Barred Plymouth Rock), Ruby (Rhode Island Red), and Buffy and Dixie (Buff Orpingtons). Hatched in May 2010, they
spent their first summer as pullets in the Eglu which we moved around the
backyard, shifting its position every day as the birds scratched up the lawn. We
were amazed at how quickly they grew from fuzz-balls into handsome birds with
distinctive plumage.

As they were nearing six months, we moved them into our
garage to provide them greater protection from the New England
winter, putting the Eglu on a tarp covered with a 3-inch layer of hay, which we
changed weekly. We added a light to give them 14-hour artificial day-length to
encourage egg production. That turned out to be quite a winter in New England! With record snowfall outside, the Flock-of-Four, cozy in the garage, averaged over 2 dozen eggs per week. We
figured the abundance of fresh eggs more than made up for shoveling out the car
that no longer fit in the garage.

The ease of keeping the Eglu in the garage vs. moving it
daily onto fresh grass led us to leave it in the garage permanently. We let the
hens (now the “garage girls”) out each day to free-range the property and they
always returned to the coop at dusk and also during the day to lay their eggs
or to drink water and consume the feed that we provided.

Molting Begins

As summer gave way to autumn with its shorter day lengths,
we decided not to add artificial light and to see what happened with a
natural daylight cycle. It didn’t take long to find out. One morning in
mid-October it looked like a poultry crime scene in the coop. Golden-tan
feathers everywhere, yet all of the flock was present, strutting about and
making their customary morning clucking sounds. What happened was Buffy had
abruptly started to molt. Feathers were falling out by the handful and her comb
and wattles were distinctly paler than the week before. She was a rather
bedraggled version of the elegant Buff Orpington she had previously been. For
the next month of molting her egg production declined to less than half of what
it had been, and continued to be vastly reduced through the winter, even after
she had regained her full plumage by mid-December. By then Dixie,
the other Buff Orpington, started her molt. Through the molting the combined
egg production of Buffy and Dixie was an egg
or so per week, but picked up to an egg or two per day with the advent of
spring.