Chickens won't use ramp to nesting boxes

I may have missed it, did you say how old your hens were? I’m assuming they started laying recently but I could definitely be wrong!

Rosemarythyme makes a very good point about fake eggs. When my flock was in the early stages of figuring things out, they had a hard time with nesting boxes... but once I added fake eggs, and showed them, it was like a beacon... “LAY EGGS HERE!” 😂 It doesn’t seem to be high enough to limit them fluttering up, even without a ladder.

apart from fake eggs, two factors come to mind: your chickens age, and winter light levels. In my experience, when chickens start laying eggs, it can be a little irregular while they figure it out. I got a lot of eggs under the roosting bars, some clearly laid while they roosted/slept. And with days just now starting to get longer, they may be staying in the roosts longer.

Think of laying an egg like the strong urge to poop... most(hopefully all 😂) times you can pretty accurately predict when it’s going to happen... but sometimes, you can’t get where you’re going in time and you need to pull the car over and run into a gas station or find some bushes. I look at egg laying like that. Sometimes the hens get surprised and just have a “Crap! I gotta lay this egg NOW” moment. And with the longer darkness hours, maybe they wake up in the morning thinking DANGIT I OVERSLEPT! And just can’t make it to the boxes in time 🤷🏼‍♀️
 

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