Egg eaters!

[kemcconnell]

Help! I have 8 hens that are about a year and a couple of months old. I have NEVER had a problem with any of them eating eggs! When I went to pick the eggs yesterday and today, there was one egg that was cracked and laying on the floor of the roost. They obviously ate the inside and left the shell. I don't know which one is responsible for it. What can I do to make this stop? I don't want them all turning into egg eaters! Any advice is greatly appreciated!

 

[Mountain Peeps]

Did the egg fall out of the nest by any chance? Once, an egg fell out of my nest and my girls all ate it. But they have never eaten an egg since! So I would be sure that they continue doing it before taking drastic action.

As far as breaking this bad habit, my best ideas are to: put fake eggs or golfballs in the nest, (if a hen pecks those they won't break and she will assume its the same with her own eggs. ) hang curtains over the nests to make them dark, (hens won eat eggs if they can't even see them!) provide plenty of calcium, (sometimes hens eat eggs because they aren't receiving enough calcium. ) and make sure the hens don't go without food or water. I've also heard of people who fill an egg with mustard so when a hen pecks it, she gets the bad taste and doesn't try to eat eggs again!

 

[ChickCrazed]

I had one hen that started this and I was never able to totally break her (she ended up dying of a dog attack a few weeks after starting this bad habit). The wood/fake eggs did slow her down though. It is a pretty easy solution, I just put a TON of fake eggs in each box thinking that it would decrease her odds of pecking at the one or two real eggs in the box.

 

[Ridgerunner]

It’s pretty normal for a chicken to eat an egg that is broken. Maybe it fell and cracked or especially if the shell was very thin, just by walking on it or scratching to rearrange the nesting material in the nest. The problem is when a chicken learns to open them herself to eat them. That’s no real common but it does happen. It is possible a hen can teach other flock members to do that. I would not be overly concerned about finding one egg like that, but if a pattern develops, yes it is serious. I had a hen that would open them on purpose once. She would open them and a few others would help her eat it. I finally figured out which one was opening them and ate her. The problem went away.

There is another possibility. It may not be your chickens. There are a lot of animals that like to eat eggs and will leave the shell behind. Birds like ravens, crows, or magpies, rats, possum, skunk, raccoons, and more. I don’t know how tight you coop is, but it can be hard to keep everything out.

There are a lot of suggestions on how to break a hen from eating eggs if you really have an egg eater. The only one I tried was to eat the one that was doing it but I raise them mostly for meat so it was an easy choice for me. I don’t know how effective the other methods are since I haven’t tried them.

Good luck figuring it out. These things are not always easy.

 

[centrarchid]

The problem no matter how it starts is that they associate the egg with food. Hard if not impossible to break the habit not only that the other will do the same. There are two things you can do, cull the hen or use these roll out nest's.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/221421937094?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1558.l2649

Isolate offending hen from flock. Increase her protein intake and do not allow her access to eggs for a week or two. This may be enabled by having very dark laying locations. I have had egg eaters on many occasions. Most is caused by poor nutrition but can also be a form of competition. Some of my gamehens will destroy eggs of rivals but leave those in their own nest alone. Rivals get around that by laying eggs in nest of egg-eater.