Feather Follicle Cysts in Chickens - Rafael Rooster Tries Life as a Unicorn

Does your hen have strange bumps or spikes protruding from her skin? Did you land on this page after searching the web for answers to her bizarre condition? Well, this is a piece about feather follicle cysts, and if that’s what your hen is suffering from, you’ve come to the right place. There’s a dearth of information on the web about feather follicle cysts in chickens, so I’ve done my best to include what I experienced with my rooster and what I subsequently learned. But while this is an article about feather follicle cysts, it’s also a story about my charming rooster dude, Rafael.

Rafael has lived most of his pleasant and uneventful life in Coop 2 here at the Hipster Hen Chicken Ranch. He’s a three-year-old Silke and is the benign ruler of a happy flock of seven hens: four Silkies, two Faverolles, and blind Bonnie, the Cream Legbar. Rafael’s pleasant and uneventful life became less so one day last September. I was getting the flock settled in for the night when I noticed a thing protruding through the fluff on his neck. Was it a clump of dirt? Had some pine shavings gotten stuck to his feathers? Was it a tick?? I picked him up for a closer look.

An up-close examination was bewildering. The thing was still a thing – something I’d never seen before. It was an inch-long hard, cylindrical white mass protruding through a hole in Rafael’s skin. I didn’t know if this object was working its way through Rafael’s skin from the outside, or if it started on the inside and was working its way out. The skin around the object looked irritated, but Rafael didn’t seem to be in any pain. It seemed to bother him only because it was there. He frequently shook his head, like he was trying to shake it off.

It almost looked like Rafael was trying to grow his own little unicorn horn. But he’d gotten confused and had grown it on entirely the wrong part of his body.

I knew I was going to have to do some research, but I hardly knew where to begin. Obviously, a Google search term of “My rooster has this thing” would not yield good results. I decided my best course of action was to post a picture on a couple of the Facebook chicken groups that I follow.

Facebook interest groups are great. Most of the groups I follow are about poultry. But maybe you’re into macramé. Or NASCAR racing. Or haiku. Or writing haiku with macramé while NASCAR racing. Or maybe you're into something totally arcane and esoteric. In all cases, I suppose there’s a Facebook group for you. But there’s one thing you need to remember when you seek advice from a Facebook group or any group. The members of the group have a variety of backgrounds and knowledge. Some have years of experience and tons of expertise. Then there are always a few newbies firmly in the grip of the Dunning–Kruger Effect who freely dispense “expert” advice that has no basis in experience or research, but is entirely based on their opinion. Interest groups are invaluable, regardless of if you are into macramé or chickens. But you should take offered advice with a grain of salt. Bearing that in mind, I posted this picture and the following text on two chicken groups. It turned out to be a good course of action—several people came through for me and set me on the right track:

““Help! Looking for answers! This is a shot of a hard, white “thing” protruding from the neck of Rafael the silkie rooster. It is a couple inches long and the width of a pencil. It doesn’t seem to go any deeper than just below the skin surface & there is no swelling or redness around the base (guessing a little on the redness since silkies have black skin, but there doesn’t appear to be any inflammation. I just discovered it tonight - it was hidden in his fluff. I’ve clipped the feathers around it so it’s much more visible now. I’ve sequestered the little guy and am trying to figure out next steps. It doesn’t seem to bother him at all except when I mess with it. He’s just beginning to molt, btw, & there are pinfeathers all around this. Could this be a pinfeather gone really wrong?””

The post generated a lot of attention in both groups. Some commenters expressed amazement. Some expressed disgust. One person got hung up on the edge of black skin around the protruding object and was sure it was some sort of metal ring. A lot of people said they would be following for further information on this mystery.

Then, one member, a vet tech, commented that it looked like the “horny growth” that she’d seen on her own dog and other dogs that she’d seen professionally. Another reader agreed with that diagnosis and suggested that it “looks like a keratinous horn. If so, it will continue to regrow without removing the associated underlying tissue surgically.” This made sense to me. I was making some progress.

Meanwhile on the other Facebook group, two readers provided some invaluable information. One commented, “After horrible googling, my nosy couch guess is feather cyst (ingrown feather).” Then a second reader chimed in, “I concur! It sounds like silkies are genetically predisposed to feather cysts” Then, she provided a link to one of the few worthwhile on-line articles about this condition. Pay dirt!

The article she linked was from PoultryDVM and was entitled, “Feather Follicle Cyst.” It’s short, but contains these key couple of sentences: “If damage occurs on just one side of the [feather] follicle, it can cause asymmetric feather growth, in which [the growing feather] is not able to break through the skin. As a result, it will curl back within the follicle and fill with keratin, instead of producing a feather.” This thing was essentially an ingrown feather!

The PoultryDVM article suggested that Silkies, because of their unusual feathers, are more likely than other chickens to have feather follicle cysts. But only two of the five references cited in the article’s bibliography are about cysts in Silkies. And one of those two “cysts in Silkies” articles is not about feather cysts. It discusses a Silkie with comb cysts associated with a fungal infection. My own search for information on feather cysts shows that they occur mostly in pet birds like parakeets and canaries. I’ve concluded that this condition is not at all common in Silkies and perhaps even rarer in other chickens.

I contacted the Silkie breeder who hatched Rafael. She’s never had a single case. Furthermore, she’d never heard of the condition. More proof of the rarity of this condition in Silkies.

The one case of a Silkie with feather follicle cysts referenced in the PoultryDVM article’s bibliography was documented in a 2008 article that appeared in the vet journal Avian Diseases: “Multiple Feather Follicle Cysts in a Moroseta Hen (Gallus Gallus).” The unfortunate little hen discussed by the Italian authors (“Moroseta” is the Italian name for Silkies) had multiple cysts as well as mange and lice. Because of her poor condition she was euthanized and no attempt was made to remove her cysts.

The Avian Diseases paper did provide a good description of how feather follicle cysts form. “Cysts develop when young growing feathers become curled over in their follicles so that the feather sheath fails to erupt. Affected follicles may coalesce and produce cysts containing abortive sheaths, keratin, and sebaceous gland secretions.” Again, a good description of an ingrown feather.

The Avian Diseases authors confirmed the rarity of feather follicle cyst reported in chickens. “Feather follicle cysts have been described primarily in…canaries, parakeets, and macaws…Follicle cysts in farmed fowl are not documented in the literature.” (Emphasis mine.) So, when the PoultryDVM writers suggest that this condition is more common in Silkies, they are either basing their suggestion on unpublished data, or they are conjecturing. It’s possible that this condition is more common than a search of the literature indicates. People have not kept chickens as pets until very recently. And a farmer raising chickens for meat or egg production would most likely cull a chicken that developed weird skin projections. No trip to the vet, and no subsequent paper in a veterinary journal.

But the good news for Rafael was that I had a diagnosis. Now I needed a treatment. Various comments in the Facebook groups suggested I use pliers or a similar tool to pull the little protrusion out. That, I decided, would not only be painful, but it would also could cause profuse bleeding or infection. It was time to visit a vet.

The Cedar Pet Clinic in Lake Elmo, Minnesota is staffed with kind-hearted and dedicated professionals. It is the closest of the few vet clinics in my area that treat chickens. Proximity is the reason I first visited The Cedar Pet Clinic. The good care my feathered pets have received there is why I’ve continued to return.

On October 1, I put Rafael into a pet carrier and made the trip to Lake Elmo, much to his chagrin. Rafael was a big hit at the clinic, though. Everybody wanted to see him, much to his further chagrin. Nobody had ever seen a chicken with a feather follicle cyst before. This was additional proof to me that this is indeed a rare condition in chickens. The Cedar Pet Clinic folks confirmed that it was, in fact, a feather follicle cyst. They also, in the process of manipulating it during the exam, broke it off. Not surprising—it was bulky, brittle, and shallow in its attachment. Rafael and I went to the vet to have the “thing” removed. It was removed. They sent Rafael home with an antiseptic liquid and some oral meds for inflammation and pain.

Rafael no longer had a unicorn horn poking out of his neck. But I suspected that this was not the end of the story. The cyst formed a dry crusty scab - but it didn’t stop growing. By late November it was an inch long. This time, though, it looked like a tuft of tiny feathers erupting from a miniature volcano.

On November 23, I put Rafael into a pet carrier and made another trip to Lake Elmo. Much to his continuing chagrin. This time, the clinic staff anesthetized the little roo, surgically removed the entire cyst, and closed the wound with sutures. Everything went perfectly, and after spending most of the day at the clinic for post-anesthesia observation, Rafael came home.

Rafael made a final trip to Lake Elmo in early December for removal of his stitches. (Chagrin? Yep.) After that, the area around the incision started to fill in with pinfeathers. Rafael is doing well. I think he’s happy to have the annoying thing off his neck. I think he’s hoping that he never has to go back into the pet carrier. And I know he’s happy to be living, once again, a pleasant and mostly uneventful life in Coop 2. And this, I hope, is the end of the story.