Thorn_shrike
Songster
Hello! I have a buff chantecler that is just a little over a year old. She has always had gorgeous, glossy, healthy looking feathers but lately I’ve noticed her feathers down her back look really stringy and oily. They aren’t being bitten at or pulled out, they’re just stringy. I might try to get a pic tomorrow, it was too late when I went out just now. Anyway, I poked around through her feathers just making sure there weren’t any mite or lice issues, and when I came to where her oil gland was…all that was there were two extremely thin little tubes that were maybe 1/2 inch long and probably the thickness of a .9 size mechanical pencil lead. I thought no way that’s her oil gland, that has to be just new little downy feathers coming in or something. But after looking through over and over I’ve determined that those HAVE to be her oil gland. I’ve looked online and can’t find any info on this, none of the pictures I saw looked like what she’s got going on. None of my other chickens look like that either. All of their oil glands are a quite decent size and easily identifiable. So what’s going on??? There’s no redness or swelling, nothing looks clogged or inflamed, doesn’t look like there’s been any trauma to the area, she doesn’t get bullied or pecked at (I would notice very quickly if something like that was going on, I sit with my girls for hours almost every day) I thought at first maybe she just got gross looking from all the rain we’ve had lately and that her feathers just dried weird, but she’s been like that for a couple weeks now, my second thought was that maybe she’s just about to go through her first big molt and looking scraggly because of that, but after watching her for awhile that doesn’t seem to be the case either.
