Stop! Egg thief.
- By Haidee Clarke
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- 17 May, 2017
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What do you do when you discover magpies are eating your chicken eggs?
At 16:30:01 precisely, this magpie was captured on ChookCam..... actually it was seen for the next half an hour popping in and out of shot. It pecked at and opened 4 hen eggs.
The sorry saga began a couple of days ago when we were finding the odd egg that had been broken and yolk sometimes missing. So what to do?
Firstly the nest boxes were cushioned with big bubble wrap under the mount of sawdust. Perhaps there was the possibility that the hens were pushing out the sawdust whilst getting comfy for touch down. Initially we wondered if eggs were cracking on landing and the hens were getting a taste for their own production. An extra bit of padding would assist! In addition to this, more oyster shell was made available, so that eggs would have a harder shell (it adds the necessary calcium to the diet of the chicken) and would be less likely to break when rattling around the nest box. But alas no, our daily egg yield was still rapidly depleting.
The next step was to leave a part open egg in the nest box with a big dollop of mustard inside..... in hope the culprit or culprits have a taste and it puts them off of eggs for life. A couple of nice hard rubber eggs were thrown in for good measure in hope the culprit gets a sore beak.
But still someone had a taste for the yellow stuff.... so we popped ChookCam into the shed and hey presto...the culprit was caught. To be fair we thought that it was an insider job. Whilst the magpies have been noticed steeling the chicken food, we thought it unlikely they would brazenly flap in to the coup and eat our gorgeous eggs. Not only don't we have enough for the obligatory weekend boiling eggs for the family, but our farm-gate sales this weekend will be non-existent!
As for what we should do now we have discovered magpies eating our chicken eggs..... Watch this space.
The sorry saga began a couple of days ago when we were finding the odd egg that had been broken and yolk sometimes missing. So what to do?
Firstly the nest boxes were cushioned with big bubble wrap under the mount of sawdust. Perhaps there was the possibility that the hens were pushing out the sawdust whilst getting comfy for touch down. Initially we wondered if eggs were cracking on landing and the hens were getting a taste for their own production. An extra bit of padding would assist! In addition to this, more oyster shell was made available, so that eggs would have a harder shell (it adds the necessary calcium to the diet of the chicken) and would be less likely to break when rattling around the nest box. But alas no, our daily egg yield was still rapidly depleting.
The next step was to leave a part open egg in the nest box with a big dollop of mustard inside..... in hope the culprit or culprits have a taste and it puts them off of eggs for life. A couple of nice hard rubber eggs were thrown in for good measure in hope the culprit gets a sore beak.
But still someone had a taste for the yellow stuff.... so we popped ChookCam into the shed and hey presto...the culprit was caught. To be fair we thought that it was an insider job. Whilst the magpies have been noticed steeling the chicken food, we thought it unlikely they would brazenly flap in to the coup and eat our gorgeous eggs. Not only don't we have enough for the obligatory weekend boiling eggs for the family, but our farm-gate sales this weekend will be non-existent!
As for what we should do now we have discovered magpies eating our chicken eggs..... Watch this space.