It can be highly frustrating when you get chickens so they can provide you eggs, and then they decide to help themselves and eat their own eggs. It makes a mess of the nesting box and surrounding eggs and can be one giant headache to fix once they’ve started.
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How Does The Habit Start?
Developed A Taste For Raw Eggs
There’s a variety of ways chickens can get a hold of raw egg whether one dropped and cracked or sometimes chickens lay eggs with extra soft delicate shells that break open. For us, we made the mistake of tossing raw eggshells into our compost heap. What we didn’t really think about, is that the chickens go scratching through our compost pile daily. We should have baked the shells in the oven first and crushed them up before adding them to the compost pile so the chickens couldn’t make the association. Anyway, the habit had been set and a few of our chickens became big time egg eaters.
Learning From Other Chickens
If you’ve watched your chickens with treats, you will have noticed that anything one chicken gets a hold of, everybody else will also show interest in it, and just have to have it. Same with eggs, if you have a chicken chowing down on an egg, it will get noticed by others who will do what they can to get in on some of the action.
Lacking Certain Nutrients In Their Diet
This is the first thing you should look into if your chickens suddenly start eating their eggs. Ensure they are getting proper calcium, protein, and water. You should always provide your laying hens free choice calcium for egg production and check to see that their feed is appropriate to their age. If your chickens are molting, they may need a temporary protein boost to help with new feather production. And lastly water, when we’ve failed to keep up on getting the chickens water in the winter, we’ve noticed an increase in eggs getting eaten as well. Summer is easier as water doesn’t freeze at that point, but I’m sure you can easily run into the same problem if you let their water run out.
Boredom
If your chickens don’t free range, and don’t have much else to keep them entertained otherwise, they may decide to mess with their eggs. This can be especially true if your nesting boxes are at eye level for your chickens (shiny object syndrome).
How To Fix It?
Ceramic Eggs
This was our method off choice. You can buy fake ceramic eggs either from the farm store or online. We put about 2-3 ceramic eggs per nesting box and the hope is that when the chickens try to break them open, they discover they can’t and then give up. For the most part it seems to work, but sometimes you have extra persistent chickens that work at it until they break open a real egg and get their reward.
Frequent Collection
Collecting your eggs frequently can help curb the habit. Try to collect eggs 2-3 times per day in late morning, late afternoon, and bedtime. Hopefully, over time, the chickens forget their bad habit and you can get to a point in which you only have to check for eggs once a day in the evening. This would work doubly well in addition to the ceramic eggs.
Mustard/Cayenne Eggs
This was a method we heard of online, and I will tell you now . . . IT DID NOT WORK! What you do is make a small hold in the top and bottom of several eggs and blow out the contents. Then you concoct a mixture of mustard/cayenne pepper . . . squeeze it into the egg with a syringe and replace the eggs into the nesting box. The aim is that the chickens are so disgusted by it that they don’t try to eat anymore eggs. In our experience, the chickens seemed to love it and the problem got worse. We’d find mustard covered beaks, including the rooster and turkey. We found out later that chickens and birds in general, don’t really taste spicy things. That was where the experiment stopped for us, though I’m sure you can find something that your chickens hate to grind up and put into empty eggshells.
Roll Away Nesting Box
You can special build your nesting boxes so that as the chickens lay their eggs, the eggs immediately roll out of reach of any naughty chickens. If you don’t have the time or tools to build your own, there are a few options available online. We haven’t gone this route yet as it hasn’t been a big enough priority, but I think it’s an excellent cure all option. If our nesting boxes need to be replaced in the future, I will definitely look into building this design.
Nesting Box Placement
You’ll want to make sure that your nesting boxes are high enough that they are above the eye level of your chickens. If chickens that are hanging out in the coop can easily look in and see the eggs, they may be tempted to check it out and mess with the eggs. Out of sight, out of mind.
Proper Enrichment
Chickens get bored and enjoy any sort of enrichment that you can offer. This can include free ranging, tossing grass clippings, hanging veggies, plastic bottle with drilled holes and treats inside, dust bath box, treat baskets, table scraps, things to jump on, etc. Keep them birds busy.
Start Over
If all else fails, you may want to consider starting over and raising all new birds from scratch. We’ve been faced with this decision once. We weren’t sure which chickens had the bad habit and which ones did not. The ones that did have the habit had it bad. So, we made the decision to get rid of all the birds and start over with a new set of chicks. I put the chickens up for sale for cheap and made people aware of the bad habit. It was sad to see some of the girls go that I had raised from chicks, but as a working homestead, we weren’t about to put up with egg eaters.
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Conclusion
What works and what doesn’t will vary per flock and come down to how persistent your birds are. It will be a trial-and-error battle until you find something that works for you and your birds. We’ve run into a couple different scenarios where we were either able to fix it, or we’ve also had to go ahead and just start over. If you have something else that works that we did not mention we’d love to hear it!
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