Does this mean the end??? They ate a duck egg this AM. Duck-Duck lives with the chickens and lays an egg everyday. She sits in the nest box but the egg usually lands outside the box on the coop floor since she is bigger than the nest box. They ate it....!!!!! I immediately put ceramic eggs in all the nests. Harriette is out there laying now. They all 4 lay in the same nest box. They have lots of options but they all 4 use it (includes Duck). Have they crossed over into the netherlands of 'eggeaters' now?? What else can I do to stop this before it develops???? (I will add that I have 2 juvenile birds spending day 2 with the older birds in the coop and run. So there is aggression going on. Maybe they took that aggression out on the egg. But the same aggression is going to be going on tomorrow and the next day too... I did separate out Hateful Helen who was out to kill the 2 young ones. The other 2 chickens and duck do chase and peck at the new birds but these girls are going to have to learn to live together.)
I wouldn't panic too much at this point. They are quite opportunistic and would be quite willing to eat an egg that is broken in front of them, but it doesn't necessarily mean they will start to break them open on purpose. For some it may be a short leap to get from "this is yummy" to "hey, if I break one open I can enjoy this treat more often" but for others, they will never get there. You may be right about the aggression. I found a broken egg and worried how it happened. The next day I spent some time in the coop to observe and discovered I had a hen going broody and there was a huge argument over "ownership" of an egg because she wanted it, but the hen who laid it didn't want her to have it, so they kept rolling it back and forth between them until I took it away from both. I surmised that is how the egg got broken the day before. Is it possible you can enlarge your nest box so the duck can fit better and that way it has less chance of rolling out and getting broken?
I had hens that started to get into the habbit of eating eggs - I saw one pecking at the egg - apparently she figured out that stepping on them/pecking them yielded a yummy treat. Soooo - I made a habit of collecting eggs early - and put some plastic easter eggs in there. The kind you fill with candy .... When she pecked it (and I know she did because it was one of the fillable kind) and found two empty halves - she gave up in a few days. Worked for me, but may not work for everyone. Problem after that was a hen went broody and started sitting on the plastic eggs trying to hatch them LOL ...
Maybe I can chill on this a bit. The 2 layers laid (in the same nest - they all like that one) an egg today and no one tried to open them. Of course, I also have the ceramic eggs out now so it might be they tried and pecked the wrong egg. Who knows. And it could very well be that Duck-Duck laid that egg outside the nest and it cracked on impact on the coop floor. The coop has sand. But since I have introduced these 2 young birds to the flock, I have stopped using Layer Crumbles and am using Flock Raiser Crumbles along with oyster shells. I don't know that the duck is getting the calcium she needs now cause I've never seen her eat oyster shells. So her egg shells seem less strong than when she was on the Layer Crumbles. I will look at a larger nest - problem is, that doesn't mean the duck will use it. I could remove this nest entirely. The nests are on the coop floor. I could also put the nests on the wall so the chickens fly up to get in it and that will leave Duck with no choice but to use the new bigger nest. All I know is I hope to goodness this is a 1 time incident. Thanks for your comments!
