Cube mk2 and WIR

[clueless chick]

Arrived home to find egg eaten how do I discourage this behaviour. New to chicken keeping the girls arrived 15/07/08.

[Christian]

You have to nip it in the bud quickly clueless chick.

 

get an egg and blow out the contents. Fill it with mustard and leave it in the nest box. You could also try adding golf balls or ping pong balls to the nest. They will try and break them and hopefully give up when they realise they can't. This should stop them breaking their own eggs.

 

Good luck.

 

 

[stoice]

You could buy a ceramic or rubber egg and leave it in the nest box so the next time it's pecked it's too hard to break. Hopefully the chicken will loose interest. Or you can blow an egg and fill it with the hottest mixture of chilli powder/curry powder/mustard etc you can find. Then if she pecks it and eats it she'll get a nasty surprise and hopefully give up. A roll away nest box could be an option (Mine live in a shed but I'm not sure how you'd fit one in an eglu! ) so the egg is never 'on display'.

 

It's possible though that the egg was thinly shelled so it easily broke or got trampled on. Once it's spilt I'd defy any chicken to ignore a free protein packed meal. Try giving your hens plenty of calcium through oyster shell or limestone flour to produce nice tough egg shells. You don't say how old your chooks are, young birds just coming into lay take a while to get 'into gear' and can sometimes lay softies (Thinly shelled eggs, membrane only, broken eggs etc)

 

Hope this helps

 

Good luck

[Krysia]

We had this problem once and had no mustard powder so used curry instead.

 

I opened an egg poured loads of curry powder in and popped it in the nest box. The majority was still there a couple of hrs later and no more egg eating.

 

Make sure they have plenty of water available though if you do this or Mustard.

[lisa33]

I used the rubber egg trick but Pepper only tried to eat eggs that were the same colour as the ones she laid. Whenever I managed to rescue an egg I used to carefully open it and wrap the shell round the rubber egg (efter dipping the rubber egg in chili powder.

 

It worked really well.

[clueless chick]

Thanks for all the tips. The egg she ate was thin shelled.

Thanks again for all the help. If it happens again I won't panick.