Egg Eaters

[Beccatrix]

My 7 one y.o. Sweetgrass girls are starting to pick up on laying. One really wants to sit (I'm desperately hoping to not hatch or raise poults). One is trying to nest, but we seem to have multiple egg eaters (we also have 5 toms; 3 need to be processed soon). Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated! They'd been mostly free range and put up at night, until the commercial property across the street started to get visits.

 

[AidKD]

Try putting a few wooden eggs or golf balls into their nesting boxes. They'll think those are real and try to eat them, resulting in them thinking that there's nothing good that comes out of the eggs!

 

[R2elk]

My 7 one y.o. Sweetgrass girls are starting to pick up on laying. One really wants to sit (I'm desperately hoping to not hatch or raise poults). One is trying to nest, but we seem to have multiple egg eaters (we also have 5 toms; 3 need to be processed soon). Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated! They'd been mostly free range and put up at night, until the commercial property across the street started to get visits.

If you don't want to hatch the eggs, collect them as soon as you find them. They are good eating and excellent for baking.

Make sure your toms do not have access to the hen's nests. If they see a hen sitting on a nest, they take it as an invitation to breed. When the hens resist the unwanted mating attempt bad things happen. The least bad is eggs get broken. The hen can get injured and in the worst case the hen can be killed.