Trimming a rooster's nails

For the last few weeks, I've been noticing a disturbing trend. Four of my hens are showing noticeable signs of feather loss on their backs above their tail feathers. Wynonna seems to be experiencing the worst of it:

But some of my other hens are losing feathers now, too:

After thoroughly checking them for any kind of bugs or mites that may have caused this, I've determined that Roopert the rooster:

is the true culprit. This is due to the, um, special attention he gives his girls on a regular basis.

I recalled a post that my blogging friend, CeeCee, of My Little Bit of Heaven, did last June on trimming her rooster's nails and realized I needed to do something like this or risk my girls' tender skin being damaged.

So, after dark last night, armed with my trusty LED flashlight, I quietly went down to the coop...:

...opened the coop door...and immediately saw Dottie, my crazy White-Crested Black Polish hen, sound asleep in the nest box, her head hanging completely slack:

Then I quickly located Roopert on the roost, squashed in amongst the girls:

I carried him into the house:

And handed him over to Jim to hold him tight:

Now, Roopert and Jim aren't the best of friends, so I'm sure it was interesting for both of them to be so close:

Look at this amazing looking foot. It's not difficult to see dinosaur ancestors when you look at this foot. His spurs have been growing very fast lately:

I used the dog clippers to snip off the pointy ends of his nails and spurs:

Of course, they then needed to be filed. He and I caught up on all the latest gossip as I did this:

I cut one nail a bit too short and applied a styptic solution to stop the bleeding. The quick on his nails was much closer to the nail tip than I could see or expected. The bleeding stopped quickly after applying this:

Look at these gently rounded nails now! Hopefully, this will protect the girls a bit:

Roopert was very well-behaved through the entire pedi-treatment, but he did draw the line at Farmgirl Pink nail polish. He wasn't having any of that:

When it was all over, I think it was clear that Roopert and Jim liked each other just a bit more than when we started:

I carried him back out to the coop and said goodnight.
When last seen, Roopert was back on the roost between the girls, giving me his steely-eyed glare of thanks: