My 10 month old EE, Spot, is behaving strangely the last couple of weeks.
She has always gotten pretty anxious when she feels her egg coming, and has a habit of frantically pacing back and forth along our screen porch, sometimes for hours. In the past she has always eventually settled on one of the two nest boxes, one in the coop and one under the kids' play set. She does make it clear that what she wants is to come lay somewhere on the kitchen porch, but this just isn't practical.
The past week or so, she has ended up dropping her eggs in the middle of the yard. My theory is that she is so stressed from her inability to find anywhere she considers acceptable to lay that she ends up with the egg just coming out on its own wherever she happens to be at the time. Kind of like a kid holding their bladder until it becomes an emergency.
No one is blocking her from using a nest box, she goes in and out of them during this process, just not being able to get happy with them. And nothing that I can discern has changed about the nest boxes.
Any thoughts or suggestions? Has anyone experienced this before?
She has always gotten pretty anxious when she feels her egg coming, and has a habit of frantically pacing back and forth along our screen porch, sometimes for hours. In the past she has always eventually settled on one of the two nest boxes, one in the coop and one under the kids' play set. She does make it clear that what she wants is to come lay somewhere on the kitchen porch, but this just isn't practical.
The past week or so, she has ended up dropping her eggs in the middle of the yard. My theory is that she is so stressed from her inability to find anywhere she considers acceptable to lay that she ends up with the egg just coming out on its own wherever she happens to be at the time. Kind of like a kid holding their bladder until it becomes an emergency.
No one is blocking her from using a nest box, she goes in and out of them during this process, just not being able to get happy with them. And nothing that I can discern has changed about the nest boxes.
Any thoughts or suggestions? Has anyone experienced this before?