How to Prevent Eggs from Breaking in Nesting Boxes

12/9/2011

When building your chicken coop, it's obvious that you need to secure it from predators that might eat your eggs as well as your chickens. However, as devastating as it is to go out and discover you have lost some of your flock to a fox or hawk, it is almost more disconcerting for many to reach into a nesting box and find a snake curled up and likely enjoying your hard earned eggs. After some more alterations, refinements and improvements, you will quickly have a fool proof coop for even the most clever of egg-loving creatures, and are feeling comfortable about the security of your birds and their eggs.

However, one day you go out to your coop ready to gather eggs and notice a broken egg or two. You don't think too much of it, these things can certainly happen, but maybe you find another broken egg that same week. The next week you find some more broken eggs and now you are beginning to see a real impact to your egg yield.

What's going on? It is not unusual to occasionally lose eggs as result of the behavior of the hens themselves, which means you will likely need to modify the bedding in your nesting boxes to give the eggs a softer place to land.

Here's how we solved our egg breakage problems.

There are a number of behaviors that can result in a reduced number of usable eggs. No matter how many nesting boxes you have, it seems the hens will all select a preferred box for the day and line up outside waiting. Often too many hens using the same box that does not have adequate cushioning will scratch around in the boxes and throw out the majority of the nesting material you have just ever so recently carefully applied. Other times hens will crack or break open the other eggs already in the box while they are moving around in them.

In addition to losing the egg for your own consumption, chickens will often develop a taste for eggs that have cracked and can eventually learn to crack them open for themselves which puts yet another problem on your hands. Therefore, it is important to not only check frequently for eggs and remove them immediately, but also be sure your eggs have a soft, safe place to land.

What we've learned
1. Build the nesting boxes as explained in the How to Build a Chicken Coop section.
2. Place non-slip rubber matting like you would use for lining kitchen shelves and drawers in the bottom of the box and affix very well with a non-toxic glue. It's important to get them stuck on well or you'll just find them out on the coop floor in very quick order.
3. Put fine pine shavings in the boxes. Larger shavings are thrown out more easily when the hens going in and scratch around to make their "nest".