They are withholding eggs!!

[TattooQ27]

I posted last week looking for egg testers and got a good list together which we were thrilled about. Our ducks were consistently laying anywhere from 2-4 eggs a day, most days we got 3 or 4. All of a sudden we are lucky to get an egg a day and I *think* it's the same duck laying the eggs. Plus, they were all laying by noon and now the lone egg layer is waiting until late evening! I am not going to be able to fill these orders if we only get one every day or two because I don't think it would be worthwhile to try incubating old eggs and I don't want to charge people shipping for bum eggs.

We haven't changed anything in their pen...no more or less lighting, food and water are available 24/7 and we are still feeding them/collecting eggs on the same schedule as always. We did change their food from pellets to crumbles since they went on an eating strike when we switched from the crumbles to the pellets. We also added scratch and oyster shell which they seem to love. Those are the only changes we have made and they have seemed to be really happy the last few weeks so we are stumped as to why they aren't laying right now.

Any ideas on why they just stopped laying and what we can do to fix it?

 

[Dances with Ducks]

Just changing food is also a common reason that ducks go off laying.
I didn't get when you started feeding them the scratch, before or after they started withholding their eggs? Scatch has a lot of corn in it, I have read that corn can reduce egg production too.
Do you have any idea why they went on an eating strike?

 

[Duck_feeder]

Is it possible the ducks are just hiding their eggs in a large nest somewhere?

 

[TattooQ27]

Quote:
We changed their food about 3 weeks ago. The scratch that we bought is rather light on corn. They were getting a pelleted layer/cracked corn mix but they hated it so we switched back to the crumbles and scratch which they are way happier with. We got 2-4 eggs a day until a week ago.

 

[TattooQ27]

I thought they might be hiding the eggs but we have checked over their entire 10x10 stall and there aren't any other nests. We even milled everything up just to be sure and didn't come up with anything. Thanks for the idea though.