How to thwart a potential egg eater?

[Lunachick]

I'm hoping this is an isolated incident. My hens were moved over to their new coop/run on the other side of my yard. It was a smooth transition.

But I think there was a little stress involved being in a different although much better coop because the next morning there was a two soft shelled eggs layed. SOMEBODY decided to investigate it and found a golden treasure and ate it. The other soft egg was brought out by Ruby dangling from her beak. I grabbed her and threw the egg out, cleaned up the yuck. Do I have an eggeater?

This morning there was one more soft shelled egg on the floor missing the yolk.

What should I do? Oh - there was two hard shelled eggs - they were not touched.

Note: 2 of my hens are debeaked and 1 is not. I'm hoping they are only going after the softies. I hope I'm right.

Is this a problem already started, or do I have a chance to nip this problem in the bud? Thank you for any hints.

 

[Red]

One of our three adult hens eats eggs occassionally...not often, like once every 4-6 months. She's at the bottom of the pecking order so we figured whenever she gets too frustrated at being pecked away from the food, she goes and cracks open an egg! It doesn't really bother us though, she's too cute to stay mad at her for long

I think you can put hard objects that look like eggs in there to try and stop egg eating? (possibly imagining that though

) Maybe a joke egg or a golf ball or something...? Has anyone else heard this or have i made it up?

Collecting the eggs several times a day makes it less likely to happen too, as obviously there are no eggs to be eaten!