do runner ducks lay in the winter or just in the spring and summer and what is the best grain to be feeding them some one told me to buy them 50:50 wheat i am now feeding them layer pellets
My Runner laid eggs through the winter last year, but all my females decided to go broody and hatch eggs (or try) this Spring and Summer and nobody has laid an egg since (though we did have one mystery egg appear a few days ago from somebody).
Mine took sometime off in January, but by February she was laying an egg a day. As for feed, I feed game bird feed and offer oyster shells free-choice.
Quote:Now that it is Fall and days are getting shorter it is natural for egg production to fall off. Days won't start getting longer until around Christmas. If the birds are healthy you can trick them into starting up again by slowly adding light so they think the days are getting longer. A timer that you can set to turn lights on a bit earlier each morning works best and allow the natural sunset to put them to sleep each night. Ducks are more seasonal sensitive then chickens so I don't recommend sudden light changes you want to basically replace the amount of light lost each week by the change to shorter days by a factor of two so if they lose 7 minutes of sunlight each week you lengthen the time the light is on by 15 minutes so their total light is increased by 7 minutes and they think the days are getting longer at a natural rate. this is a trick used by Show people that want their ducklings to hatch right after new years so they have the maximum amount of time to develop for the shows held later in the year. If you don't want ducklings in january be more conserative in the amount of extra light you give them. Of course the natural days are shorter in the North then they are in the South during the winter-spring season so the times I mentioned are for example only and will need to be adjusted for you actual local day length.~gd
