Will night-laying ever stop?

[buckabucka]

Success! Large piles of shavings resulted in our first unbroken night egg in weeks! A full 2 oz. egg.

I guess I'll just keep piling the shavings until the leghorn shakes this silly habit (assuming she will someday).

 

[superchemicalgirl]

Good job! My picking up the egg this morning resulted in only one coop floor layer today!

Double happiness!

 

[Yay Chicks!]

That's super weird. I mean, I found an egg on the poop board only a couple of times. Just an accident, I imagine. I have nooo idea what would cause one bird to keep laying at night. Anyway, good job finally getting an unbroken one!

 

[hoppy]

Quote:
i agree with SCG. remove any night light. if I am supplementing light, i turn mine on 2 hours before sunrise by a timer. when i left it on all night long, they would lay in the middle of the night. i also checked out your page. your nest boxes might be too dark to entice the girls to use them or it could be the wire on the bottom feeling unstable. first thing I would do is remove the top cover or front where the little hole is to your nest boxes. by opening them up, this might make them more comfortable to use them. for you hen that lays eggs in the run, you don't want dirty eggs, they could make you sick by the bacteria getting into them from wet ground. usually if i have bird that does this, a fake egg or just leave 1 egg in the box(mark it so you know which one it is) and once they see that is where all the hens are laying they do too. maybe even put that hen in the box so she gets the idea of where it is.

 

[buckabucka]

Thanks, Hoppy. Things have improved with our leghorn. I didn't entirely remove the nightlight, but turned it so it shines at our house (as opposed to directly at the chickens in the coop). The night laying stopped, except for maybe one night egg per week.

I think you may be right about needing to change our nest box. SCG had suggested making some movable nest boxes, to help train them to lay in the box. We put one out in the run, and one up on the roosts. The night layer and the outdoor layer immediately took to the new box up on the roosts, so we left it there. It faces the sunny south windows, but they don't seem to mind that at all.

We now have 7 of 16 who are laying, and only 2 consistently use the community box. We got the design from a website that said chickens do not like to eat in the dark, and that would help prevent egg eating. All of the chickens like going in to check out the community box, but most choose to lay in the one box on the roosts, which was causing a line at the box.

We put the other movable box that had been outdoors in another area on the roosts, and 2 hens laid there just today.

Meanwhile, I like the idea of making the openings on our community nest box bigger. For a while, I was actually wondering if our light brahma could fit through there, she is so big!

(She does fit, though). I'm hoping the community nest box will work out eventually, even if in some altered form. Since they all tend to like to lay in the same box, it would make things simpler if they could all just pile in!

 

[Judy]

There's nothing wrong with your nest box, it's just not the preference of all of them.

I have 5 nest boxes, 2 on top of 3, standard wood boxes with tops. I also have a plastic bin in a corner. I also have two scraps of osb, maybe 1' X 2', leaning up against the coop wall. I don't have a covered kitty litter box but some chickens prefer being hidden like that. They lay in all these places.

Since she likes the floor, I'd put a cardboard box, or whatever you have lying around, on the floor where she laid.

And I'd turn off the night light, too. Might be she would not lay at all in the dark. Mine never do.

 

[Roo-man]

I have one Sussex hen and on copper Maran they are old enough to be laying eggs but so far none have laid any eggs that are a chocolate color.
Do these hens need the same breed of roosters for the chocolate color.???

 

[rebel-rousing-at-night]

Quote:
From what I have read and eggs I have seen on the Marans and dark eggs thread,there can be a lot of variance in egg color.I don't know much about the Sussex but with Marans here's briefly what I've read.Hatchery Marans tend to have lighter eggs.It helps if the Marans was hatched from a dark egg and it helps if the roo that was the father of the Marans hatched from a dark egg also.
Sometimes the Marans eggs start out lighter but after a couple of weeks the ink jets crank up and the eggs get darker although this is not very common.
It may be that your Marans will never have dark eggs.For a long time I thought if it was a Marans the eggs would be chocolate and only chocolate.It would be nice but that ideal is wrong.

 

[Roo-man]

Thanks for the reply, that is what I thought.