Friday, September 19, 2014

Eggless Sadness

We bring you sad news on our saga to break the egg-eater habit. Our ladies had discovered how yummy their eggs are. They have now developed into egg eaters. If we are vigilant with multiple checks throughout the day of their nesting box, we are lucky to find 3 eggs from our 48 egg layers, but most days we are down to 0. We have checked with all our resources on how to break the habit. They have an abundance of calcium in their feed. We filled empty egg shells with mustard but they eat it gone – shell and all. We put golf balls in their nest so to learn it hurts to attempt to break it. We invested in a $300 nesting box that rolls away the egg as they lay them (which we catch our smart girls walking back and forth and craning their necks to reach the goods).
 
As a last recourse, with heavy hearts we even snipped the ends of the beaks of those we caught with mustard on their face to attempt to detour them. We even separated those that we have caught from the others to see if we would have eggs at the end of the day but we are afraid that the hens have modeled this bad behavior and it is now learned by all of them.
 
Our options now are to either run a petting zoo of eggs eaters or to cull the clan and start fresh with a new flock.
 
We will take on the deed next week and will plan when best to order new chicks. What it does mean is no more eggs this year. We are so very sad to share with you this news.

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