chicken or duck?????

[mudchicken]

we have 8 standard laying hens (leghorns and nhr's) mixed in with 3 pekin ducks. one of the ducks is female. All were hatched the end of March of this year. Also in the mix are 7 old english bantams. i have a few questions......

1. when will the bantams start laying? the woman i got them from said they hatched about the beginning of july, making them roughly 12 to 14 weeks old

2. my standards went through a mini molt i believe, egg laying went downhill. they are laying now, but during that period and even now i am getting slightly larger off white eggs. I thought that pekins laid eggs when they were a year old???? Does anyone have a leghorn compared to a pekin duck egg picture? thank you
John

 

[SycolinWoodsChickens]

Can't help you with the bantam question because we don't have any but I do have several Pekins that are laying now. The eggs at first were about the size of a jumbo chicken egg but now they are about 25% larger than one. Also, the Pekin eggs have a kind of brownish waxy coating that make the eggs kind of off-white (not brown).

Good luck figuring this out.

 

[mudchicken]

yeah, thats about what the size is. although my off white color is more like a cloudy grey-ish. they do have a waxy coating. i thought that it was just the leghorns going through a molt, but then thought maybe it would be a duck egg. all but one was found in the laying boxes (other one found in the run). so i guess maybe im just lost lol. any other ideas?

 

[mudchicken]

so any ideas on when bantams start laying eggs? is it the same as standards?