My first flock of chickens will be ready to lay their first eggs in a few weeks. What's a good way to encourage them to use the nest boxes rather than just laying the eggs in a corner of the coop.
My first flock of chickens will be ready to lay their first eggs in a few weeks. What's a good way to encourage them to use the nest boxes rather than just laying the eggs in a corner of the coop.
I wish I knew the answer to this one. Ours lay in the hay loft, on the ground, in the sheep pen, oh, and sometimes in the laying baskets! A friend told me that it is important for the laying boxes to face north so that there is the least amount of light on them, but I have not tried out this theory yet.
Frank
Staunton, VA
I am no expert but my farm girl wife just moved any mislaid eggs into one of the boxes. It seemed to work. Took a minute but as I remember the old hen house on the farm faced east and ours faced south and had a good size window in the south wall. The window had an extended roof over it to shade the it.
You'll get some in the egg boxes, and some all over the place. Are you free ranging your chickens? That's what we do. You have to keep searching, and hopefully, you'll find the chickens' favorite laying spots, and you'll be able to collect as many eggs as possible. Every once in a while, we'll move something in one of our barns and find a collection of eggs that we didn't expect. Since we don't know how long they were sitting there, we feed them back to the chickens. Chickens love smashed eggs!![img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]
Rich
"What a long strange trip it's been."
RichZ,
I think you have just trained your chickens to eat eggs. [img]/forums/images/icons/wink.gif[/img]
We have some fake eggs (ceramic?) for that purpose. Keep a couple in each nesting box and collect the eggs laid errantly ASAP and the biddies soon get the idea. What kinda chickens you got?
<font color="blue"> What kinda chickens you got? </font color>
I have Buff Orpingtons and Rhode Island Reds. A friend and I bought 25 of each in May and I kept 20 of the Buffs and 10 Rhode Island Reds. We ordered sexed birds and I ended up with one Rooster.
I keep the birds in an 8X8 coop I added on to my barn and during the day let them out into a fenced yard which is about 24X20. A few times a week I let them out into the field for a few hours so that they can eat some grass and clover and find a few more insects.
I want some Buff Orpingtons but I'm having a hard time finding a local breeder. The ones they sell up here at the COOP are all sex-links. Not a "breed" I consider worth owning for the backyard. The few Canadian breeders I have found all want about 6$ per chick - not gonna happen.
We got a 3 yo RI Red rooster thats very savvy and keeps his biddies safe and can flat wake you up at daylight. The hens include Red Leghorns, Aracuans, and Barred Rocks. The Barred Rocks are big egg producers but are dumber than a stump and prefer pellets over scratching for bugs. They're all turned out mid-morning and invariably deposit a few eggs each day up high in the haystack to be found by me pulling a bale down from above my head.
We've got one Barred Rock hen that sometimes jumps into the space between bales of hay in the barn to lay eggs. Then she can't get out. Every night when I lock up our hens at night, I count each variety we have. If one Barred Rock is missing, I have to go in the barn and shine a light inside all the spaces between our stacks of hay bales. Eventually I will find her. Before I realized that she was doing that, she was once missing for several days. She never learns!!
Rich
"What a long strange trip it's been."
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