EGG EATING CHICKENS
Here
is a Question I recently received from a subscriber to
this newsletter (together with my reply - and the solution
that worked for him). It just goes to show that for every
chicken issue there are probably one-hundred different
solutions :-)
Gina
! Do you have any ideas on how to keep a chicken from
eating their eggs? Thanks, Fred (Oklahoma USA).
-----
If
they have got a taste for the eggs it can be tricky to
stop them.
The
first thing would obviously be to try to collect the eggs
as quickly as possible.
Another
option can be a nest that collects the eggs underneath
so that the hen can't get to them (I have a video on my
blog of someone making a homemade egg catcher
http://successwithpoultry.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-to-build-your-own-egg-catching.html
)
Golf
balls or other fake eggs in the nest may help put them
off.
Dark
nest boxes can also sometimes help (chickens seem to like
to see what they are eating)
I
don't know if you saw it or not but in the '200 eggs'
book there is a bit on stopping egg eating (a hatchet
is recommended in severe cases!) - He also gives an account
of someone else's method (which I have never tried, so
I can't vouch for it, but you may find it useful):
"Mr. S. D. Fox, to whom I have several times referred,
has a method of breaking hens of egg eating as novel as
it is efficacious. "My hens got to eating eggs one
spring," he says, "and I went to work to cure
them. I got an egg, chipped off one end and took out the
yolk and white. Then I filled up the egg with soft soap,
sprinkled in a good stiff dose of cayenne pepper, stuck
on the end with white court plaster, and dropped the egg
on the hen house floor. They eat that egg. The next day
I give 'em another. They eat that. The next day I give
'em a third. They didn't eat that, and they never eat
another so far as I know. Didn't like the flavor, I guess.
Hurt 'em? Wall, no, I never see that it did. Might have
cleaned 'em out a little -
soft soap is good for that, you know - but it didn't rumple
a feather, so far as I could see."
-----
Thanks
for the information!! Before I received info from you
on this item, I took matters into my own hands: I took
a red, yellow, and a blue plastic Easter Egg and glued
them closed. Placing the blue one in one nest and the
red and yellow in another, and left the third nest empty.
I got some interesting results: Both hens (adult) chipped
the blue one to pieces but not only did they not attack
the red and yellow egg, they both now lay in the same
box with the red and yellow egg, abandoning the nest they
once laid in. Isn't that interesting? Thank you so much
for the info.
