Feather Loss in Chickens: How to Tell If It’s Molting or Something Else
The bare patch showed up on the Barred Rock in the second week of September, and the man who found it did what nearly everybody does. He said molt, and he went back to the house.
It was a reasonable thing to say. September is the season for it. There were feathers scattered around the run and half the county was seeing the same in their own coops. Feather loss in chickens is common enough in the fall that the word molt gets applied to all of it without much examination, and most of the time nobody’s the worse for it. This time it cost him until November.