Our Daisy likes to make me go on an egg hunt every morning. She and Daffy sleep in a 3ftx8ft coop with white pine shavings for bedding. I am finding that she likes to bury her eggs. I clean and fluff out the coop everyday and I am afraid that I will step on the eggs one of these days. Is there some sort of trick to this whole egg laying business?
I use a falsey in our coop and it works great. I took one of those plastic Easter eggs that you can open to put candy in, then I filled it with sand so that it is about the same weight as an egg. Fortunately my ducks can't count higher than 1, so they don't seem to notice that I take the real egg out each morning.
Yup, pick a spot that you want her to lay (if you are going to allow her to brood ducklings take that into consideration) put an egg, golf ball whatever there and leave it until she continually lays there.
Hi! You know those trays that the bread companies load their bread on for the delivery guy to take to the stores? Get yourself 3 of those. Only put the straw/pine in those boxes, set those boxes in the general location that she normally lays. or the darkest corner. Don't put any shavings anywhere else in the coop, but make sure you have a nice deep pile in those bread trays. I had 4 girls, and I had them in a 4x5 coop. I set those bread trays in the back corner, all together. And that was the only place that I put in the straw. I used flakes of stray in the bread boxes and then I'd skatter a thin layer of pine on the floor just to make poop clean up easier. They slept in the nest boxes each nite too. The nice thing also, is when it comes time to clean the coop, you could always just take off the top layers of straw to get the poop off. The one they chose to lay their egg in, that one was never pooped in. Also, made for totally coop cleaning a breeze. Just scraped everything into the nest boxes, toted it out to the compost or trail I was building, and wa-lah! Total coop cleaning took a matter of 10 minutes every week, and a matter of minutes daily. These are what I am talking about...
I guess I need to do that as well. My Anconas have always laid in the nest box on the left end except once when one laid just inside the coop door. We figured she was far enough outside that she just didn't make it all the way back when the urge started. Well, and the one shell-less egg dropped right in front of me from the 4' roost Monday night. She put a proper egg in the nest box the next day. But, the Cubalaya that laid first seems to lay next to another egg if there is one. She has laid twice in the box, in two places (4' community) and once in front of the trough under the nipple waterer pipe. In all three cases, there was another egg next to it. One Australorp has now laid twice, both times on the coop floor. I even put her IN the box Sunday when she was doing the "gee, things just seem out of sorts" behavior exhibited by the Anconas before their first egg. I don't know if there were eggs in the box for her to use as a "target" in the box when she laid them. It could be that your girl might not be intentionally burying her egg. I clear a space under the hanging feeder and in front of the trough so the shavings don't hide dropped food or get in the trough. But the girls scratch around and you can't even tell those spaces were bare and there are shavings in the trough. I guess I need to screw it up on the wall a few inches. Or, she could be burying them Bruce
