Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Poultry and Pets => The Hen House => Topic started by: ctayts on June 14, 2010, 21:14
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Just caught them eating an egg.
What shall I do?
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You can buy dummy eggs! Or you could try blowing an egg and then fill it with all the hot food you can find Chilli, tabasco sauce etc, it works sometimes, (Not on mine tho) roll away nest boxes so the eggs lay in a gully until collected. Sure there are many more ideas these are just a few
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Hi,
You can try putting some golf balls, china eggs or rubber eggs in their nesting boxes, so they peck these and after realising they can't get anything from them, lose the habit of pecking the real ones. This tactic has been known to work :).
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Try and collect your eggs as soon as possible after they've been laid. Remove any broken/soft shelled eggs and bin them, never give them back to the chucks thinking they could use extra protein/calcium. However we do bake our used shells and break them all up to give back mixed in with their corn.
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Easier said than done when working in the day. :)
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you could always make a roll away nest box or even buy one this way the eggs roll away out of the reach of the egg pecker and can stay safe until you get home :)
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I have the same problem - and the china egg and quite a few golf balls have mostly cured it.
The only time the egg gets eaten now is when it has a soft shell and I can't seem to fix that! I have tried baked broken egg shells, oyster shell and grit and lots of greens and free ranging and limestone flour supplement and changing food.
I did find that you can buy roll away inserts to put inside your normal nest boxes but I reckon it would be really easy and cheap to make your own.
Bev
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Are they getting enough grit ?