When will she start laying again?

[FuzzandFurFarm]

Hi All,
We are new to the Forum. We've had alpacas since 2007, ducks for over a little over a year and chickens for less than 6 months.

We have a pair of 16 month old Rouen Ducks that we quite enjoy watching run around our farm.

Our female, "Morgan" has been a really great egg layer. We decided to let her sit on a nest and hatch out her eggs (instead of taking them like we normally did).
She had 12 eggs in the nest, not all were fertile (apparently "Mister" our male wasn't quite doing his job!

), Only 2 hatched and unfortunately one duckling "disappeared" one night at about 3 weeks old, probably eaten by something

The surviving duckling is doing very well, we're not sure of sex but we're hoping for a female, so we can have more eggs! (and the chest feathers look like her mother's, so we're crossing our fingers) She is 7 weeks old.

The question is when will Morgan start laying again? Has she started and we just haven't found her new nest are? Or should we be on the look out?

We usually lock them in their pen at night, and let them out mid morning, but occasionally we let them spend the night out (usually they bed down under the trees/bushes next to our pond when they are out), so we may need to just find where she has started laying again.

Thanks in advance for your help

Denyel

 

[lovin my birds]

This is my first year owning ducks so I cant say for sure if this is going to be right. But I know with my chickens they dont start laying until their chicks are about 4 or 5 months old. Its their way of making sure that their babies are well taken care of. Im sure its probably the same with ducks. Im affraid the only way to cure this is to take the baby away, or wait till the baby is old enough where she doesnt feel obligated to take care of her.