Small Farm Life

No, I don’t expect you to believe it either, but it happened.

The ducks are laying eggs.  In their duck house, they have scooped out a little nest in the straw, but most days, they lay eggs on the fence line between the duck pen and the pheasant pen.  Ducks do what ducks do.  There’s no telling them different.

A few times, I have found one or two eggs in the nest.  It doesn’t matter really where ducks lay their eggs, but it makes life easier for me.

You see, birds put eggs in nests to keep them in storage until they have a clutch and decide to become broody – that is, sit on the eggs until they hatch.  So a bird will lay and egg, then lay a second, and so on.  If a farmer, like me,  collects the eggs every day, as I do, the bird forgets where it laid the first egg. So the next day it may be in some new place and who knows where it will be.  Farmers who raise true, free-range, egg-laying chickens, literally have an egg hunt every day as they try and find the eggs.

One trick, shared by books and other poultry raisers, is to put a fake egg in the nest a few weeks before the ducks or chickens start laying.  Then the birds learn that’s where the eggs go.  I didn’t do that with the ducks, so I’m behind the times…..and I didn’t have any wood eggs, so I borrowed two plastic eggs that break in half from Easter egg baskets, a blue one and a purple one.  I have had the blue one in the duck “nest” for a couple of days.  There have been no real duck eggs in the nest since I put it in, and the ducks have moved the egg a few inches each day, and I move it back.

The "egg" as I found it

The with plastic "egg" open to reveal the duck egg inside

This morning was no eggception (pardon the pun).  The ducks had moved the fake egg a few inches.  But as I started to reach in to move the blue plastic artificial egg back to the nest,  something didn’t look right.  When I picked it up, I knew something odd had happend.  I set it back down and these are pictures of what I found…..as I found the egg, and what was inside the egg.  Yes, thats a duck egg inside the plastic one.

I told you you wouldn’t believe it.

Related posts:

1. The duck house
2. Duck :30
3. True Grit -and- The World is My Oyster (shell)
4. The first egg — from an unexpected hen
5. Neighbors being neighbors: Cattleman for the weekend