It’s a sunny spring day. The coop doors are open to the outside, and the hens are digging and scratching in the wet leaves. It’s too early, yet, to do a thorough coop cleaning—there will still be a few days of sloppy snowflakes and nights when the temperatures fall below freezing. It’s just the right day, though, to pause while working in the perennial beds, lean on the rake and watch the hens.
They are busy scratching in the leaves and digging out little seeds and all sorts of treasures. They chatter and gossip in a neighborly way. The feathers on their fluffy butts waft gently in the breezes. I have an assortment of chicken breeds in my flock, so those fluffy back feathers are varied in color –red, black, gray, brown, even white and blonde. They look so nice and ICK!!
Stop reading right now if you think the rest of the story is going to be about fluffy feathers or gossiping hens. It’s not. It’s going to be about poop. Specifically, poop stuck to those fluffy feathers…and what I do to get rid of it.
I think probably, if you have chickens, there will come a time when you, too, will look at the end of a chicken that is supposed to be all fluffy and realize that it’s pretty nasty looking. This usually happens, here, after a winter when the hens haven’t been able to get outside much, and before there’s much to dust bathe in besides floor litter.
So. I put up the rake and assemble my “tools”. I don’t have an outside tub for hen bathing, and since I do use my kitchen sink for preparing meals – the butt-cleaning process takes place alfresco. On the backside of our coop, we have several stacked straw bales covered with a tarp. It’s the perfect height and breadth to lay out a few cotton towels, a pair of scissors, a couple of pieces of clean bath toweling from the rag bag, a pair of latex gloves and a couple of buckets of hot water.
My hens are friendly girls, used to being picked up and handled, so it’s no problem capturing the icky chickie and tucking her head under my arm.
I began by assessing the problem, soaking one of the terry cloths in the warm water (it started out hot, but by the time it made it to the coop, and I caught the chicken, it cooled to a comfortable temperature), and just sort of draping it on the back end of the chicken.
warm cloth on chicken |
After a minute or so, I started working the softened manure off the chicken’s feathers. The water bucket was handy, so it was easy to clean, remove, rinse and repeat. I removed every bit of stuck on debris that I could, and then I trimmed the dirty feathers. Cut them right off. I used a clean washrag, soaked in the water from the second bucket (still clean) to do a final rinse, and then I dried the area thoroughly. If I had electricity at the coop, I might even have used a hair dryer on low to dry and fluff those clean feathers.
All clean and rinsed! |
Finally, I set the hen gently back in the coop, and let her preen and refluff as best she could. It didn’t take long before she was happily chatting with the others again.
I think this is the simplest way to clean up a chicken’s nether parts. It’s certainly not my favorite part of hen keeping, but it’s one of the responsibilities that come along with it—part of keeping the flock healthy.
Next time you’re leaning on a rake watching and listening to your chickens – give them a look-over. Are all those up-ended butts fluffy, or do they need a bit of spring-cleaning?
6 Comments
This article is very well written and informative! Meredith could write write professionally, actually. As for my chickens, I use a warm bath and epsom salts and do a quick blow-dry. They get some healthy magnesium and a good clean-up to go along with the bath!
The feathers themselves are “dead”, it’s similar to trimming fingernails. Use the small scissors made for cutting children’s fingernails, the ones with rounded ends, so that you don’t accidentally poke the wiggling bird. When the balls of poop are large and dangling, I just cut those off first before attempting to wash the back end. Also make sure that their toenails are not encrusted with mud balls, which can happen when mud and poop are mixed together during wet seasons. This mud mixed with poop dries like cement, and won’t fall off on its own. Eventually it can alter the chicken’s ability to walk correctly and can cripple them. Catch it early. For chickens with encrusted toes, or excessive mud/poop (one chicken I rescued had it in her lower feathers and had actually worn down her beak trying to remove it), I use a deep plastic dishpan dedicated for animal use. Heat water in a teakettle, and pour it in the dishpan. Take it outside and add enough cold hose water to make it slightly lukewarm. Put the chicken in and hold her down into a squatting position if you need to soak the lower feathers, or gently splash water onto the butt feathers. Rub at the encrusted areas. Talk in soft tones; I’ve also found singing helps to calm them. Mine have wiggled and resisted at first, but especially when working on getting the encrusted mud off the toes, they seem to figure out that you are trying to help them. Eventually the mud balls soften, develop cracks, and can be picked off. After a towel-dry, I put the chicken in a wire animal cage in the house (those made for rabbits, puppies, kittens, with a top hatch) and set up a small heater that has a blower and a low setting aimed at the cage. (I need to put mine on a little stool to get the blower above the solid rim of the bottom of the cage.) They seem to like standing in the warm air, though they want to face it. I live in a cold, wet climate, but they dry this way, even with the warm air aimed at the wrong end, a lot faster than they do with just an air-dry. I don’t own a hairdryer, so I haven’t tried that.
Ya I have just one silver wyndotte that has the problem but it is not very bad so I just wipped it off as best as I could. 90% came off and she seems to be ok. Isn’t the spring time when they lose those butt feathers anyway or am I wrong about that? If it continues I will go to the wet cloth solution and the sissors.
Interesting, the only chicken breed I have had this problem with is also a silver laced wyandotte. I trimmed the worst feathers and used an epsom salt soak to coax the rest off.
I have a Barred Rock that has a nasty butt! She is the only one. We have put her in the bathtub twice so far and cleaned her off. It was middle of winter and we didn’t blow dry her. I guess we should have. It was too cold to do it outside so the bathtub it was. It built back up again after a few weeks and had to repeat the process and again it has built back up and she needs another cleaning. I’m thinking now that because she was still wet back there that when she did her business again a little stuck to the wet parts and it just builds up from there. I was afraid to cut her feathers, thought she might bleed. But I’m going to give all that a try next time. All the other hens have sparkling behinds 😉
Thank you Meredith! I found your informative article when searching how to clean my ex-battery hen I adopted last week. She had nasty, caked on poop from who knows how long sitting in its faeces. She’s all clean and happy now.