French Molt Blues

By Sally O’Dwyer

Kitty Newman Aviary

You start out with a great season.  Good fertility and lots of chicks hatching. Then, you notice that a couple of the chicks in a nest box or two seem a bit “off”.  They just don’t appear to be vigorous.  Chicks in another nest don’t seem to be growing and their stomachs look distended.  There seems to be a rather high incidence of deaths among the chicks. Some nest boxes have perfectly healthy chicks.  But, in another nest box, the chicks have splotchy down—their heads seem balder than they should be.  Then, chicks in yet another nest box lose all their flights.  What the heck is going on?   It hits you.  You have an outbreak of French Molt, and its spreading throughout the aviary.   French Molt is a virus that has been frustrating breeders of Budgies for hundreds of years.  The disease was coined French Molt because in the late 1800’s it was seen in the large numbers of Budgerigars that were shipped to the rest of Europe from breeding farms in Southern France.  And, of course, it is called “Molt” because it causes the feathers of chicks to fall out.   The disease is somewhat unpredictable and it affects birds in varying degrees. While adults infected with the disease typically exhibit no symptoms, chicks will show a full range of symptoms.  It may be that birds infected at a younger age are more severely affected.