Help! Rats stressing duck?

[FernbergFarms]

Hello! I have ducks and we’ve had a mouse issue in the duck coop and the mice would drowned in their water and since it got colder we added hay bails and took their big water out so we haven’t gotten any drowned mice for awhile but my hen hadn’t laid an egg that I’ve seen in 1-2 weeks! Could mice be taking her eggs? I watch watching a video on it and one lady said her duck got so stressed because mice were taking her eggs she stopped laying eggs! Has this happened with my ducks? Have rats infested the hay? How do i get rid of them?! Thanks Alli

 

[Callender Girl]

Maybe your duck is just taking a winter laying break? Mine have, but they're all runners who take a vacation from laying every winter.

I have one coop that has a constant mouse problem (so does my farmhouse). Sometimes, the problem belongs to the mice because all of my Iowa Blue chickens in that coop will gladly eat them. I put no-kill, metal box traps in the coops to help keep down the mouse traffic without harming my birds.

If you have a rat problem, in my experience, that's much harder to control. After watching the little buggers race -- through tunnels -- from one of my coop runs to another last year, I tried everything but eventually attached hardware cloth to the wooden frameworks of the runs and the floor of the coops, and bought an expensive ($40 is pricey in my mind) electronic box trap that zapped the rats to death. I also had kill traps outside the coops, stuffed essential-oil soaked pads into the tunnels and yelled out the house windows like a crazy woman.

Good luck with taking care of your babies.

 

[FernbergFarms]

@Callender Girl thank you!
It has been getting colder so that could be it. And my boys would kill the mice and leave them on the ground. I was just worried this was make her not lay again or that they infested the hay. I do have random wholes in the hay and ground is that from mice?

 

[Callender Girl]

Not sure about the holes in the hay. Mice, when they do make holes, make pretty small ones. When I had rats, their openings were much, much larger.