Splish, Splash, Time To Give Her A Bath

Dirty chickens take dirt baths...they get dirty to get clean. Chickens rolls around in the dirt covering themselves until they completely turn brown, dirt captured in between every single feather. Dirt baths help them get rid of loose feathers, bugs and parasites, and exfoliate their skin. Once they are done with their daily bath, they shake off all the dirt surrounding them in a cloud of dust like Pig-Pen from Charlie Brown.

For most chickens, dirt baths work perfectly and I don't need to groom them any further. But in every crowd, there is an oddball.

Speedy

Meet Speedy, my Brahma chicken. She is my largest chicken weighing in at roughly 12 pounds. She is also one of the prettiest chickens in the flock with a necklace of black feathers around her neck surrounded by Snow White feathers. She even has feathers on her feet making her look like she is wearing white slippers.

Speedy has been a part of my flock for three years, and she is definitely my highest maintenance chicken. She's not high maintenance because of her sweet disposition, she is the loveliest of birds, but because of her size, her inability to cope with the blistering heat of the summer, and because of her somewhat disgusting rear end. No one likes cleaning a dirty egg, so it was time to give ole Speedy a bath.

Speedy and I love each other, I give her treats and she follows me everywhere, but notice how I'm carrying her in the picture with her bottom facing away from me....she was disgusting to say the least! Being the biggest and loudest girl in the flock, she eats the first and the most out of all the other chickens. I'm a big girl too....big girls love to eat! She is definitely at the top of the pecking order, and at the top of the pecking order, you eat the most. Unfortunately for chickens, they don't know how to use toilet paper so everything they digest gets stuck to their fluffy butt. I'm sorry, TMI, but this is how my story goes.

Because of Speedy's overeating habits, I have to give her baths five or six times a year. I don't want to deal with a bug infestation in my coop or terrible disease with the rest of my flock because of her inability to clean her bottom..

Bath time is not enjoyable for either of us. She doesn't like being submerged into water, and I don't like having poopy water flung in every direction around me. The very first time I gave Speedy a bath was in the middle of winter. She had frozen poop stuck to her butt, and I was afraid it would create frostbite on her derriere making it difficult to lay eggs. When a chicken does not lay eggs, they get really sick and could possibly die. I didn't want her to freeze in an icy bath water outside, so I gave her a bath in the utility sink of my mud room. Never giving a chicken a bath before, I didn't know how the situation would go.

Well, how did it go? She did something I didn't expect...she flapped her wings. When a bird flaps their two, enormous wings around water, water sprays everywhere causing an amazing amount of water to spray upwards, sidewards, downwards, and all around like a jetting spring from the ground. My entire mud room was dripping with water in a matter of seconds. All the water from the sink was emptied out because her beautiful wings had flung it all around the room. Thankfully while she was flapping like the crazy lady she was, I grabbed ahold of her chicken feet so she didn't fly around my house (yes, chickens can definitely fly). Once she calmed down, I held down her wings while I scrubbed her bottom to get the ickies off of her.

After she was clean, I had a problem I didn't think through before the bath. If I put her back outside, her bottom was really going to freeze with icy feathers. Frostbite would definitely happen and that was what I was trying to prevent in the first place. Plan A....blow dry the chicken. I didn't think blow drying an already flustered chicken would be a great option, so I had to go to Plan B. Speedy was invited to be a guest at Kelly's Chicken B & B (my bathroom) so she could dry herself throughly before going out to temperatures below the 20s. I wish I had a picture of the bathroom to show you! Because of the nervous wreck she was, she pooped EVERYWHERE in my bathroom. She may have stayed in my bathroom for two hours, but it took me five hours to clean up the mess she made in that small room.

Three years later, Speedy and I now have the bathing escapades down pat. After I

catch her while she is eating tasty mealworms, she gets her wings held down on either side of her body in an outside plastic tote. I hold her closely with one arm while the other arm cleans her dirty bottom. Bath time is still not our favorite thing to do, but now I can walk away without being entirely soaked.

As for the rest of my flock, they take dirt baths to get the grubbies and bugs off their bodies....a method I wish Speedy could figure out better.

Thanks for reading my Country Squawk,

Kelly