As humans became ‘civilized’ and water and cleansing agents became widely available, bathing in water became more commonplace and to some extent, the purpose of bathing was forgotten. We tend to bathe out of habit and the primary purpose of bathing is no longer as relevant as it is to other species.
Because we now have clothes to protect us from our environment, the condition of our skin with regard to protecting us from our environment has become of secondary importance. We attire ourselves in different garments for the different circumstances we encounter, including combat.
This hasn’t been the case for the chicken. The purpose of bathing for the chicken is primarily for the conditioning of skin and feathers.
When humans get ‘dirty’ we wash in water. Our skin excretes a saline solution (water and salt) when we sweat which helps clean our pores, but dirt will stick to the sweat and leave us feeling uncomfortable and sticky. Hot showers, steam baths, saunas, Turkish baths all aid skin cleaning by encouraging the skin to sweat and the residue we wash off with plain water. When we become particularly dirty we scrub our skin with an abrasive be that a sponge, luffa, or even pumices stones, and rinse with water. All the above systems work because of the nature of our skin and because of the secretion of sweat. The salt in our sweat is soluble in water.
For a chicken getting clean is rather different. Chickens don’t sweat; they don’t have sweat glands.
What the skin of a chicken excretes is oil in tiny amounts through the follicles that their feathers grow out of and through a gland at the base of their backs called the preen gland. To condition and help make their feathers water-resistant, the chicken rubs its beak and neck around the preen gland area and spreads the oil it picks up on its feathers. While preening doesn’t make the feathers waterproof; it’s the zipping together of the tiny barbs on the contour feathers that give the contour feathers their water resistance, it does condition and helps the contour feathers in particular shed a certain amount of water.
The purpose of the dust bath for chickens is to absorb excess oil on their feathers and skin. Once the chicken has thrown a sufficient quantity of dust over their bodies and this dust has mixed with the oil they can then pick off the dust that has absorbed the oil with their beaks by grooming.
Some dead skin (dander) will inevitably stick to the oil but the majority of a chicken's dead skin is removed through normal grooming along with dead quill ends and parasites. The chicken pecks at the skin and feathers to dislodge the dead skin and then shakes itself so the dead skin falls to the ground. For the contour feathers in particular which are the strongest feathers providing the greatest protection from the elements and during mating and fighting, a small feather called the filoplume which carries tiny nerve endings situated next to the contour feather quill can be used to arrange the contour feathers in an optimal position for grooming.
If you have kept a chicken confined in your house for some reason one of the things you will have noticed is the quantity of dander dropped on the floor. This happened without the aid of a dust bath.
If you have had to deal with a chicken with scaly leg mite for example you will know that immersing the legs in oil, or surgical spirit is necessary to drown the mites, or alternatively, a thick coat of Vaseline that adheres to the leg is needed to suffocate the mites. A chicken dust bathing is unlikely to achieve a sufficient covering of dust to suffocate mites.
There are other benefits to dust bathing for chickens. While they are dust bathing some parasites may be removed, in particular lice, but interestingly there is some evidence that when they bathe in certain types of soil ants may remove parasites.
Finally, dust bathing can be a social event for chickens, but my observations have led me to the conclusion that different types of soil promote communal bathing in preference to bathing solo.
If you’ve tried to clean up spilled oil with water you’ll know it’s a pointless task. The same can be said for trying to wash a chicken in water.
You may remove some particular spots of feces for example and the chicken will look cleaner judged by human standards of cleanliness, but not by the chickens.
People use soaps and detergents to wash chickens to overcome the problem of removing oil.
This isn’t good for the chicken. One only has to think of the damage detergents in shampoos due to human hair and the necessity of using conditioners after washing to try to restore the oils you’ve just washed out to understand this. Add to this that you can’t scrub a chicken's skin through the feathers, nor can you easily apply any conditioners so the effect of any detergent will be to dry out the chicken's skin and feathers leaving them unprotected from bacteria and the feather quills brittle and fragile like dry hair.
I had a young pullet with three four-day-old chicks get caught out in a very sudden and intense storm. Her natural instinct was to protect the chicks from the storm, a cold wet chick of that age goes hypothermic and dies very quickly. It rained over an inch of water in the space of a few minutes and the hen got completely soaked. Because she had spread her wings to protect the chicks the inside of her wings and the sides of her body which in normal circumstances would have had at least some protection from her contour feathers got soaked through. Once I had rescued her I weighed her and she weighed 18% more than when dry.
I’ve had another hen get knocked into an old-style wash basin with vertical sides and a scrub slope on one side. Chickens can’t swim and because of the extra weight of the water, she couldn’t use her wings to jump out. Fortunately, somebody found her quickly, but she went into shock and for the first hour when I was trying to dry her out it didn’t look like she was going to make it.
Some do get very wet when caught out in the rain but given the increase in body weight and the loss of the ability to fly they’re extremely vulnerable when wet and hypothermia can push a chicken into shock and eventual death.
Water is for drinking when it comes to chickens.
Once the reasons that chickens dust bath are understood it then becomes worthwhile considering what types of soil and dust make a good dust bath.
There is a wide range of options for dust bathing for chickens where I live and I’ve noticed a distinct preference for two particular types of dust baths.
The first type comprises the ash that gets thrown out from the wood-burning stoves here. There are two main sites for this, one is on the driveway leading to the main house and the other I constructed outside my house. At the site on the main drive wood-ash has over time mixed with the fine dust eroded from the gravel that is the main driveway material. The hens here are very fond of this site, but I have never seen a rooster bath here.
The same is true for the site outside my house. This is wood ash that over time has mixed with fine soil. Once again, the hens will bathe here but the rooster never has; they just stand and guard the hens.
The dust bath on the drive.
The dust bath I made outside my house.
However, provide a freshly dug and sifted pile of compost and you have trouble getting the roosters out. Both hens and roosters will bathe in this.
Both types provide fine particles but the wood ash sites give a fine, dry, material while the compost, or newly turned earth, has a degree of moisture in it.
Two favorite dust bath locations with moist soil.
I became intrigued by the difference in the roosters' and hens' dust bathing habits and carried out some rough experiments.
Rubbing a finger on the chicken preen gland allowed me to roughly assess the viscosity of the oil it secretes. The nearest oil I had available to this was a light oil used for sewing machines.
I poured this oil onto two pieces of silver foil; 1.0 ml per piece of foil.
I added a gram of the dry dust to one piece of foil and a gram of the slightly damp compost soil to the other. I waited five seconds and then tipped the dust and soil onto a sheet of white paper.
What I found was there wasn’t any perceptible difference between the two types of ‘dust’ when it with respect to the amount of oil they had absorbed. The difference between the two was the dry wood ash dust coagulated and formed lumps having absorbed some oil, while the moist soil tended to remain ‘loose’.
The hens bathing in the dry wood ash dust spent on average 6 minutes bathing. Both the dry wood ash bathing sites are relatively exposed and the roosters have a habit of hustling the hens out of their baths at the slightest sign of danger, or when the majority of the hens move off leaving a single hen, or two in the bath. The hens when using the dry wood ash baths tended to bath with a gap between them, each hen having a small bathing area separate from the others, the senior hen often demanding the ‘best’ spot’.
The moist compost-type baths are more communal and often an entire tribe bathes together, The most obvious difference with these baths is the rooster's bath with the hens and everybody baths in a tight group, jostling and shoving. These communal baths last considerably longer, on average 36 minutes. Occasionally I’ve found a single rooster bathing in this type of bath.
Two roosters and two hens bathing in one of the favourite moist baths.
The next bath along. The soil in these baths is moist all year round because the enclosures get watered. The roots are grapevines.
I have tried making a sheltered dust bath with both types of ‘dust’. I made one underneath one of the coops using soil and wood ash. The chickens used it once that I observed then went and bathed in one of their preferred sites. I made another outside my house with similar results. It seems the chickens prefer an open site.
My favorite bathing spots have stayed the same over the eight years I have records for. There was one favorite spot that no longer exists and this used to be the top of a pile of composting straw and hay on the outskirts of the sheep field that had some cover given by clumps of rosemary bushes growing on the bank above. The chickens used to scrape away the loose straw and make a hollow in the compost beneath.
The preferred bathing spots change with weather conditions. It doesn’t take a lot of rain to turn some of the preferred moist soil baths into mud baths. The fine dust bath spots are very weather dependant but tend to dry out more quickly than the moist soil. On the few occasions it has remained wet over a few days the chickens just don’t bath, or as in the picture below, find a make do spot with ordinary earth until the ground dries out.
Chickens given the opportunity will dust bath in most types of ground they can scratch and break down into dust. What I became interested in was the marked preference of the chickens here for the two distinct bath types and the rooster's reluctance to bath in fine dry dust. I imagine for the chickens ancestors the jungle fowl the fine dry dust baths are not an option, jungles tending to keep humid under the tree canopies and the soil remaining moist through the seasons.
While it is true that you can get a chicken to settle in a bath of warm water if you force the issue, and there may be some medical reasons why this is advisable, I have never heard of a chicken voluntarily getting in a water bath, they even avoid deep puddles here. There are, during the summer here, lots of potential water bath sites for chickens; at least three bowls which a chicken could if the desire for a quick hot bath overtook them get in and out of without difficulty or risk of drowning. Then there is the ‘pond’ for the Muscovy ducks. In the summer the water gets quite warm. Not once has any chicken shown the remotest interest in getting in any of these potential baths for a quick wash, or splash around to cool down, or even get clean.
Chickens spend a large proportion of their day grooming and maintain correct feather orientation.
For chickens, the condition of their feathers is vital to their survival. A chicken with damaged feathers maybe that fraction of a second slower when trying to escape a predator. Better feather condition may mean they receive less damage when fighting, or mating Well oiled and groomed feathers will offer better protection from the elements and greater resistance to harmful bacteria.
Water does absolutely nothing to help condition a chicken's feathers or skin.
If chickens came with a care and cleaning label like clothing the chicken's label would read, DRY CLEAN ONLY.
Because we now have clothes to protect us from our environment, the condition of our skin with regard to protecting us from our environment has become of secondary importance. We attire ourselves in different garments for the different circumstances we encounter, including combat.
This hasn’t been the case for the chicken. The purpose of bathing for the chicken is primarily for the conditioning of skin and feathers.
When humans get ‘dirty’ we wash in water. Our skin excretes a saline solution (water and salt) when we sweat which helps clean our pores, but dirt will stick to the sweat and leave us feeling uncomfortable and sticky. Hot showers, steam baths, saunas, Turkish baths all aid skin cleaning by encouraging the skin to sweat and the residue we wash off with plain water. When we become particularly dirty we scrub our skin with an abrasive be that a sponge, luffa, or even pumices stones, and rinse with water. All the above systems work because of the nature of our skin and because of the secretion of sweat. The salt in our sweat is soluble in water.
For a chicken getting clean is rather different. Chickens don’t sweat; they don’t have sweat glands.
What the skin of a chicken excretes is oil in tiny amounts through the follicles that their feathers grow out of and through a gland at the base of their backs called the preen gland. To condition and help make their feathers water-resistant, the chicken rubs its beak and neck around the preen gland area and spreads the oil it picks up on its feathers. While preening doesn’t make the feathers waterproof; it’s the zipping together of the tiny barbs on the contour feathers that give the contour feathers their water resistance, it does condition and helps the contour feathers in particular shed a certain amount of water.
The purpose of the dust bath for chickens is to absorb excess oil on their feathers and skin. Once the chicken has thrown a sufficient quantity of dust over their bodies and this dust has mixed with the oil they can then pick off the dust that has absorbed the oil with their beaks by grooming.
Some dead skin (dander) will inevitably stick to the oil but the majority of a chicken's dead skin is removed through normal grooming along with dead quill ends and parasites. The chicken pecks at the skin and feathers to dislodge the dead skin and then shakes itself so the dead skin falls to the ground. For the contour feathers in particular which are the strongest feathers providing the greatest protection from the elements and during mating and fighting, a small feather called the filoplume which carries tiny nerve endings situated next to the contour feather quill can be used to arrange the contour feathers in an optimal position for grooming.
If you have kept a chicken confined in your house for some reason one of the things you will have noticed is the quantity of dander dropped on the floor. This happened without the aid of a dust bath.
If you have had to deal with a chicken with scaly leg mite for example you will know that immersing the legs in oil, or surgical spirit is necessary to drown the mites, or alternatively, a thick coat of Vaseline that adheres to the leg is needed to suffocate the mites. A chicken dust bathing is unlikely to achieve a sufficient covering of dust to suffocate mites.
There are other benefits to dust bathing for chickens. While they are dust bathing some parasites may be removed, in particular lice, but interestingly there is some evidence that when they bathe in certain types of soil ants may remove parasites.
Finally, dust bathing can be a social event for chickens, but my observations have led me to the conclusion that different types of soil promote communal bathing in preference to bathing solo.
If you’ve tried to clean up spilled oil with water you’ll know it’s a pointless task. The same can be said for trying to wash a chicken in water.
You may remove some particular spots of feces for example and the chicken will look cleaner judged by human standards of cleanliness, but not by the chickens.
People use soaps and detergents to wash chickens to overcome the problem of removing oil.
This isn’t good for the chicken. One only has to think of the damage detergents in shampoos due to human hair and the necessity of using conditioners after washing to try to restore the oils you’ve just washed out to understand this. Add to this that you can’t scrub a chicken's skin through the feathers, nor can you easily apply any conditioners so the effect of any detergent will be to dry out the chicken's skin and feathers leaving them unprotected from bacteria and the feather quills brittle and fragile like dry hair.
I had a young pullet with three four-day-old chicks get caught out in a very sudden and intense storm. Her natural instinct was to protect the chicks from the storm, a cold wet chick of that age goes hypothermic and dies very quickly. It rained over an inch of water in the space of a few minutes and the hen got completely soaked. Because she had spread her wings to protect the chicks the inside of her wings and the sides of her body which in normal circumstances would have had at least some protection from her contour feathers got soaked through. Once I had rescued her I weighed her and she weighed 18% more than when dry.
I’ve had another hen get knocked into an old-style wash basin with vertical sides and a scrub slope on one side. Chickens can’t swim and because of the extra weight of the water, she couldn’t use her wings to jump out. Fortunately, somebody found her quickly, but she went into shock and for the first hour when I was trying to dry her out it didn’t look like she was going to make it.
Some do get very wet when caught out in the rain but given the increase in body weight and the loss of the ability to fly they’re extremely vulnerable when wet and hypothermia can push a chicken into shock and eventual death.
Water is for drinking when it comes to chickens.
Once the reasons that chickens dust bath are understood it then becomes worthwhile considering what types of soil and dust make a good dust bath.
There is a wide range of options for dust bathing for chickens where I live and I’ve noticed a distinct preference for two particular types of dust baths.
The first type comprises the ash that gets thrown out from the wood-burning stoves here. There are two main sites for this, one is on the driveway leading to the main house and the other I constructed outside my house. At the site on the main drive wood-ash has over time mixed with the fine dust eroded from the gravel that is the main driveway material. The hens here are very fond of this site, but I have never seen a rooster bath here.
The same is true for the site outside my house. This is wood ash that over time has mixed with fine soil. Once again, the hens will bathe here but the rooster never has; they just stand and guard the hens.
The dust bath on the drive.
The dust bath I made outside my house.
However, provide a freshly dug and sifted pile of compost and you have trouble getting the roosters out. Both hens and roosters will bathe in this.
Both types provide fine particles but the wood ash sites give a fine, dry, material while the compost, or newly turned earth, has a degree of moisture in it.
Two favorite dust bath locations with moist soil.
I became intrigued by the difference in the roosters' and hens' dust bathing habits and carried out some rough experiments.
Rubbing a finger on the chicken preen gland allowed me to roughly assess the viscosity of the oil it secretes. The nearest oil I had available to this was a light oil used for sewing machines.
I poured this oil onto two pieces of silver foil; 1.0 ml per piece of foil.
I added a gram of the dry dust to one piece of foil and a gram of the slightly damp compost soil to the other. I waited five seconds and then tipped the dust and soil onto a sheet of white paper.
What I found was there wasn’t any perceptible difference between the two types of ‘dust’ when it with respect to the amount of oil they had absorbed. The difference between the two was the dry wood ash dust coagulated and formed lumps having absorbed some oil, while the moist soil tended to remain ‘loose’.
The hens bathing in the dry wood ash dust spent on average 6 minutes bathing. Both the dry wood ash bathing sites are relatively exposed and the roosters have a habit of hustling the hens out of their baths at the slightest sign of danger, or when the majority of the hens move off leaving a single hen, or two in the bath. The hens when using the dry wood ash baths tended to bath with a gap between them, each hen having a small bathing area separate from the others, the senior hen often demanding the ‘best’ spot’.
The moist compost-type baths are more communal and often an entire tribe bathes together, The most obvious difference with these baths is the rooster's bath with the hens and everybody baths in a tight group, jostling and shoving. These communal baths last considerably longer, on average 36 minutes. Occasionally I’ve found a single rooster bathing in this type of bath.
Two roosters and two hens bathing in one of the favourite moist baths.
The next bath along. The soil in these baths is moist all year round because the enclosures get watered. The roots are grapevines.
I have tried making a sheltered dust bath with both types of ‘dust’. I made one underneath one of the coops using soil and wood ash. The chickens used it once that I observed then went and bathed in one of their preferred sites. I made another outside my house with similar results. It seems the chickens prefer an open site.
My favorite bathing spots have stayed the same over the eight years I have records for. There was one favorite spot that no longer exists and this used to be the top of a pile of composting straw and hay on the outskirts of the sheep field that had some cover given by clumps of rosemary bushes growing on the bank above. The chickens used to scrape away the loose straw and make a hollow in the compost beneath.
The preferred bathing spots change with weather conditions. It doesn’t take a lot of rain to turn some of the preferred moist soil baths into mud baths. The fine dust bath spots are very weather dependant but tend to dry out more quickly than the moist soil. On the few occasions it has remained wet over a few days the chickens just don’t bath, or as in the picture below, find a make do spot with ordinary earth until the ground dries out.
Chickens given the opportunity will dust bath in most types of ground they can scratch and break down into dust. What I became interested in was the marked preference of the chickens here for the two distinct bath types and the rooster's reluctance to bath in fine dry dust. I imagine for the chickens ancestors the jungle fowl the fine dry dust baths are not an option, jungles tending to keep humid under the tree canopies and the soil remaining moist through the seasons.
While it is true that you can get a chicken to settle in a bath of warm water if you force the issue, and there may be some medical reasons why this is advisable, I have never heard of a chicken voluntarily getting in a water bath, they even avoid deep puddles here. There are, during the summer here, lots of potential water bath sites for chickens; at least three bowls which a chicken could if the desire for a quick hot bath overtook them get in and out of without difficulty or risk of drowning. Then there is the ‘pond’ for the Muscovy ducks. In the summer the water gets quite warm. Not once has any chicken shown the remotest interest in getting in any of these potential baths for a quick wash, or splash around to cool down, or even get clean.
Chickens spend a large proportion of their day grooming and maintain correct feather orientation.
For chickens, the condition of their feathers is vital to their survival. A chicken with damaged feathers maybe that fraction of a second slower when trying to escape a predator. Better feather condition may mean they receive less damage when fighting, or mating Well oiled and groomed feathers will offer better protection from the elements and greater resistance to harmful bacteria.
Water does absolutely nothing to help condition a chicken's feathers or skin.
If chickens came with a care and cleaning label like clothing the chicken's label would read, DRY CLEAN ONLY.
