The secret nest of eggs, hidden in the crook of a tree.

I can’t speak for all poultry growers, but from my experience, free range poultry can offer some fun challenges in egg collection.

Poultry, like most living things, are creatures of habit. The chickens tend to lay in the nesting box, and go about their daily business or scratching and foraging for bugs and dusting themselves. The ducks, who sometimes lay anywhere the egg drops, for the most part find a corner of the duck house and lay before 8 am, then go about their day foraging in the ponds.

But with 6 fairly prolific ducks, I’m only finding 3 – 4 eggs a day which suggests either some flock stress, or someone has a secret egg stash.

When duck :30 came Thursday night, when one of the ducks failed to return to the pen, I guessed she has gone broody and is sitting on her secret nest.

So let me introduce the cast of characters so you can keep the layers straight:

There are 10 ducks and 2 geese in the lineup:

Two cayugas are part of my original four.  Both are ducks (not drakes) and lay very well almost year around.

A brown runner (now with white spots) duck and the white crested drake with the biggest crest are gifts from my friends Lori and Ev, who needed to give them a new home. We did a meet-you-half-way drive to Missouri to exchange them in a ferocious rain storm.

Two cayugas, (one drake, one duck) arrived last summer, along with

Two black runners (one drake, one duck) who sometimes I call DIB or “Ducks in Black” because during the winter, they would run along side the goose and gander almost like secret service agents protecting POTUS and FLOTUS.

POTUS and FLOTUS are the goose and gander.

Finally, two new crested, one duck and one drake, round out the 10.

During winter, all 12 were fairly tight, moving as a flock together.  With spring, they have divided into tribes.  The brown runner and crested keep to themselves on the far end of the big pond and are often the last back at night.

The new cayuga drake, the crested duck,  the two DIB runners and a cayuga duck from the original ducks now form the group I call “the gang of five”.

The other three tend to hang with POTUS and FLOTUS the geese.

During Friday’s photo for my 365 project, I noticed the gang of five was a gang of four… and it was the oldest cayuga who remained out over night.

Seven eggs all in a row. From either one week or over several days.

Friday, after I finished my University work and some follow up to a day long meeting, I decided to go seek her nest.  What I found, in the nook of a tree at the top of the little pond dam, was this secret stash of eggs.  There are 7 eggs, but its impossible to guess their age.  They may have all been laid this week or they could be daily eggs over the last few weeks.

She is no where to be found, and so I’m not certain this is her nest…it may belong to one of the others.

I suspect their is another nest in a wood pile where I see the gang of five hanging out during parts of the day.  I’ve searched there, but cant find anything….yet.

But not to be outdone, is the young Amerucana hen who leaves the coop each day, sneaks out of the fence and into the barn to hang out with the two roosters.  The roosters  are in “detention” for being a little rough in their breeding habits.  I have two roosters and 5 hens, that’s a bad ratio and it shows. 3 of the hens have have their back and neck feathers plucked by the roosters (named El Senor and Colonel Sanders).

So like an abused lover from COPS or the Jerry Springer show who can’t give up her man, she runs over to visit the boys in their detention.  She’s made a cozy nest there, and each day, lays her egg there.  So rather than fight nature, I just collect her egg there  during chores as I water the turkeys and once or twice a day, pick her up and carry her back to the other hens.

Testing the roosts

The opening question is priceless: “Do you have to have a rooster if you’re gonna have chickens… if you wanna get chickens for eggs?”

Answer: “Chickens are just like us they in the fact that we will cycle through our own eggs whether or not we are dating someone.”

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.

From left to right, the duck egg, last week's pheasant egg, and a store purchased chicken egg

I shared the discovery of the first pheasant egg, and Sunday, I found the first duck egg.  It was broken and was on the wood platform the duck swimming pool rests on.

Whether the duck egg broke on the wood, was stepped on by one of the ducks, or had a soft shell due to it being the first egg and the warm weather?  I don’t know.  But it’s time to think about nutrition. Tuesday night, I found an intact duck egg.  smaller than what they will be in time and with the grey color described in early cayuga ducks.

I’ve been feeding a general flock raiser blended feed that has about 18 percent protein to both the  pheasants and the ducks.   The youngest pheasants are on a 27% protein feed through their 6th week, then tape to the lower protein.

The ducks eat from a dog bowl, and the grit and oyster shell is in the green container

The calcium in this feed is too low for laying birds , Storey’s Guide to Raising Ducks: Breeds, Care, Health suggests 3 – 4 percent, so its time to add calcium to their diet in the form of oyster shell.  At the same time, even though the ducks eat on the pond a lot, I don’t know for sure they are getting enough grit for their gizzards, so I added a container of grit for them to free choice from.

The chickens will also need calcium, they are still on a grower ration of about 20 percent protein and I’ll add calcium to the feeder for them to free choice as well.  The roosters eat the same feed, so the hens can ge the oyster shell as they choose.  I’ll  move the hens to a 16 percent layer ration in a month or when I see the first hen egg, which ever comes first.

I also removed the wood platform from the duck run and spread more wood chips around the pool to reduce the mud and make a softer area in case someone else decided to lay an egg or two there.  And sure enough, that’s where Tuesday’s egg was found.

Pheasant egg

I have 4 laying hens, about 12 weeks old.  I also have 3 Cayuga ducks, about 20 weeks old, both all well known for their egg laying.  I also have 38 hen pheasants, about 10 weeks old (although some are looking roo-like in their plumage.)
So imagine my surprise to find that the first egg of Two Mile Ranch is a pheasant egg in the fly pen this afternoon.  The pen is thick with 6 foot tall weed growth, and the egg as at the edge of the weeds, laying on the bare ground.

As thick as the cover is in the pen, it is likely there are other eggs in there.

Weed and cover growth in the fly pen. The fly pen is 25 x 45 and 6 foot tall.