Rats?

[BLACKCATFARM]

I believe this is from a rat. The egg was found broken at the top, with nothing left inside. Please advise. Rat or something else?

 

[Folly's place]

It could be a rat, or one of the chickens.
Look for rat poo! Also, during the day you might find a chicken with yolk on her face, a sure sign. Very thin shelled eggs are easy to break, and birds will eat any broken eggs, just because. Deliberately breaking them is the problem, and if rats are present, you can loose chickens too.
Mary

 

[BLACKCATFARM]

It could be a rat, or one of the chickens.
Look for rat poo! Also, during the day you might find a chicken with yolk on her face, a sure sign. Very thin shelled eggs are easy to break, and birds will eat any broken eggs, just because. Deliberately breaking them is the problem, and if rats are present, you can loose chickens too.
Mary

Thanks so much for the response! Yeah, I’ve had a couple of yolky beaks! But upon further digging around, literally, I found a mouse family! They are now evicted! And working on coop and run improvements!

 

[cmom]

I agree with Mary. I had a rat infestation in one coop. When I started renovating it dozens of rats of all sizes poured out. As I was renovating I found some nests in the ceiling and the wall cavities. I tried a lot of different things and finally resorted to poison. I'm not advocating using poison it's just what I did because there were so many rats. There were so many and I started seeing them in our barn which is behind the coops. I bought some rat bait stations and bait and put the bait stations in pet carriers on shelves in the barn so nothing but the rats can get to the bait. I didn't find any dead rats laying around so I assume they went into their tunnels that were around the coops and the barn and died. I wouldn't feel too bad if a predator did eat one because the likelihood that the predator would die from eating the rat is slim. It might make them a little sick but not usually fatal unless they actually eat some of the bait. Good luck...

 

[Al Gerhart]

Could be a squirrel too. They love eggs. Standard advice for dealing with critters, treadle feeder for the feed, metal cans for the bulk feed, and clean up all approaches to the coop so the vermin have to travel in the open where other predators can get at them.