Rural Gardening: Laying eggs on the coop floor, 1 by mevnmart

mevnmart wrote:
Hey guys and gals! I've got one Americauna in my flock - her name is Babyface because she looked like a chick in the face for far longer than the rest of the birds. She's my only pastel egg layer and my customers LOVE buying her blue-green eggs. The problem is, she won't use any of the TWELVE nesting boxes I have for my flock of 25. I caught her laying the other day. She buries her head in the corner of the coop! It was so cool because I actually got to see the egg being laid. The main problem is that the corner she's chosen is right under the roost, so it's the dirtiest place she could have picked. Her eggs, even the one I picked up 30 seconds after she laid it, get poop on them and stain. I'm hesitant to sell customers eggs that have stains, even though they're clean, and so we eat a lot of her eggs (and others that I can't get looking pretty) and sell the beautiful ones.

What, if anything, can I do to get her to move to a nesting box? One of the box rows (four boxes each) was originally part of the coop and is the preferred location for most of our birds to lay. It's about 4 feet off the ground. The other eight are across from each other and are much closer to the floor - about 1 1/2 feet up. I was thinking if I could catch her at it again, I could move her to a nesting box, but I don't want to stress her out if that's not going to work. Anyone had a similar problem, and is there anything to do about it?

P.S. I've attached my "ghost chicken" picture. I think she moved her head too fast, and she ended up looking see-through! (Not Babyface - I think she's a RIR).