Was very excited when I found our first egg in the duck house corner on Sat morning! Daisy Duck is 22 wks old and has a boyfriend. Donald (of course!) that is same age. I had to let dogs out at 5:30 am and she was acting interesting...I knew she was getting ready to lay an egg even though I had never seen this! She would kind of mumble and peck at the shavings in a spot in the corner...then lay down on her belly it looked and then scratch her feet out behind her. She did this over and over and I have had enough experience with mom animals getting ready to birth babies that I watched her for awhile. Nothing more happened so I went back to bed.
Got up at about 7:30...went to check house and sure enough there was an egg in the exact spot she was 2 hrs earlier! It was big and felt heavy...so I put it on counter till today when my husband said she did another egg! So, he decided to try them for breakfast before he woke me up! He came in and said she had done another so he cooked the two eggs...said they tasted like chicken eggs! But the yolks were darker yellow and the whites were very firm. That is like the homegrown eggs we have had before.
The shell was very hard and both were double yolks, does that sound the way it should be? They forage in back yard all day and they have oystershell and grit free feed and I give them some feed that is for all stages once a day.
How often will she lay and will it always be a single egg? How do we know if it has a baby duck in it? Don't really want more ducks, but I can't seem to get the mechanics of how they lay, why and when are they fertilized eggs? I see them do the deed here and there so my mind said she'd start laying eggs...but I hear it's not quite like that!
A total explanation of how this works would be most helpful! LOL!
Got up at about 7:30...went to check house and sure enough there was an egg in the exact spot she was 2 hrs earlier! It was big and felt heavy...so I put it on counter till today when my husband said she did another egg! So, he decided to try them for breakfast before he woke me up! He came in and said she had done another so he cooked the two eggs...said they tasted like chicken eggs! But the yolks were darker yellow and the whites were very firm. That is like the homegrown eggs we have had before.
The shell was very hard and both were double yolks, does that sound the way it should be? They forage in back yard all day and they have oystershell and grit free feed and I give them some feed that is for all stages once a day.
How often will she lay and will it always be a single egg? How do we know if it has a baby duck in it? Don't really want more ducks, but I can't seem to get the mechanics of how they lay, why and when are they fertilized eggs? I see them do the deed here and there so my mind said she'd start laying eggs...but I hear it's not quite like that!
A total explanation of how this works would be most helpful! LOL!
Ducks mating isn't necessarily connected with the females laying. Females may lay sporadically, or have irregular shaped eggs(or double-yolks or shell-less eggs) for the first few weeks of laying, and yes, the shells are a fair bit harder than chicken eggs. Once she's settled into an egg-laying routine, you should normally get no more than one egg from her a day. After a female has been bred, the eggs she lays will be fertile for about two weeks; the fact they're fertile doesn't matter, you can still eat them. The only way they could begin to form a baby is if the female went broody and stayed sitting on the eggs for a couple days.
