Today, I noticed Marge trying to bath in the corner of the coop where I toss in the kitchen scraps. She was pushing away the leftover Clementine peels and rolling in the small collection of sand against the hen house. I’m thinking: Why are you doing that when you have a dust bath all set up for you at the other end of the coop? I looked over to where I had set up their bath and my dust bath had disappeared! The hens had enjoyed it so much that they managed to scatter all the sand and ashes through the rabbit wire and down the hill.
Ok, I expected them to scatter things; I just hadn’t figured on just how fast they would scatter it. So, I did a little measuring and cut myself some wood to make a low wall to contain the material. To help seal up the gaps, I added a bit of straw along the edges. The bath material will still get scattered around, but this should keep it somewhat contained for a little longer.
Dust baths serve chickens three major ways. First, the dust helps to keep their feathers clean and free of parasites. Dust keeping them clean sounds like a contradiction. It isn’t. The sand acts as an abrasive, rubbing in their feathers to scrape off anything that may be on their bodies. Think of it like using sand as an abrasive to remove oil and grease from your hands.
Second, in hot weather fluffing out their feathers as they wash allows air to get to their skin. Chickens don’t sweat; they cool their blood through their comb and waddle. Fluffing their feathers helps radiate heat off their skin to increase their ability to transfer body heat to cool down. I specifically put my coop in the shade of my neighbor’s trees so it stays very cool. Still, weather being what it is, I want the girls to have a way to cool down quickly. Fluffing around in a dust bath is a great way to do that.
Finally, they clean their beaks as they poke through the material to eat small bits of sand. This sand passes through their digestive system to their gizzard where it helps grind up seeds and grass fibers. I also add a little crushed oyster shell to their feed to give them grit for their gizzards. A small amount of the calcium in the oyster shell also gets into their bloodstream and helps them to form hard shells on their eggs. This is really not a big deal. Most of the calcium in their diet comes from the soy and peas on their feed. Yes, their feed contains dried peas, the same ones you buy at the store to make split pea soup. The peas in chicken feed are smaller — too small to look good in the package at the store — but in all other respects are exactly the same.
As for what goes into the dust bath, it’s really just two things: All-purpose sand and ashes from a charcoal grill in a 3:1 ratio by volume. The ashes coat their feathers and give them the chicken version of sunscreen. The sand isn’t the Play Sand people buy for their children’s sandboxes. That’s river sand that’s been washed and filtered to create something that looks pretty and doesn’t give off dust when kids toss it into the air. All-purpose Sand is the stuff you use when you’re making your own 3:2:1 concrete (3 parts gravel, 2 parts sand, 1 part cement). This sand is rough — large grains and small mixed with very fine particles that don’t really qualify as grains at all. It’s a lot cheaper than sandbox sand and far better as a base for a dust bath.
My dust bath is two sacks of sand to a 5-gallon bucket of ashes. This isn’t exactly 3:1 by volume but it’s pretty close. As you can see from the video, Marge prefers it to the Clementine peels and grit. Cinder and Chowder also find the dust bath an absolute delight.
Ed