by Ginger Wolnik
People frequently ask me how to stop their canary hen from laying eggs. This is not usually a problem for wild birds or birds raised as close to nature as possible, but cage birds with unlimited food often try to raise multiple clutches of 4 to 6 chicks each, which is not good for the hen's long term health. However, realize it is normal for a hen to lay eggs and trying to stop her from laying any is not healthy either.
First you need to understand how canaries normally get in breeding condition and when they finish breeding. This information and advice is for canaries, other species of birds may be similar, but many have very different triggers, so please search for an article on that species instead of applying this article's advice.
Canaries naturally breed in the spring and their breeding hormones are triggered by:
They normally stop after raising one or two clutches of chicks because:
In addition, the wild hen's body is stressed from feeding growing chicks, which is even more demanding than laying eggs. Her mate may be available to help, but he will also be spending time and energy defending their territory from other canary families. He may also be away at times philandering, especially if the neighbor hen's mate is killed by a predator (or maybe by him!)
Compare now to the conditions of the cage canary:
One way to prevent a canary hen from laying is to starve her, but that is cruel and not healthy for her. I prefer to give my birds good nutrition and room to exercise year round. All my breeding cages are long enough to provide some flight and my hens are in a large flight cage when not breeding. As a result, they are healthy and will start laying eggs in the spring whether or not I plan to breed them and put them with a male. It is better to just let them do this natural behavior.
If you don't provide nesting material for a hen that is ready to breed, she will often pull her own feathers out in a desperate attempt to build a nest. It is better to just go ahead and provide strings or shredded toilet paper and let her build a nest and lay a clutch of eggs. If she is not with a male, then the eggs will be infertile and you can just let her sit on them for a few weeks. Provide lower protein (14%) food during the period of low activity and she will be fine just sitting there most of the day. Eventually, after 2-4 weeks, she will give up and soon lay another clutch. You can let her do this two or three times without harm. Just make sure she always has access to a calcium source such as cuttlebone so she can form the egg shells, otherwise she will become egg bound and quickly die. Also, make sure she gets vitamin D, either from direct sunlight (not filtered by glass) or from vitamin coated seeds or from pellets. Vitamin D is needed to absorb the calcium.
If you want to breed canaries, then put her together with a male and allow them to raise no more than 2 clutches of chicks while providing high (18%) protein food while laying and feeding. Feed them low protein food while then hen is incubating the eggs. If the male assists with feeding the chicks, then she will lay the next clutch as early as 2 weeks after chicks hatch. If fact, the chicks may accidentally break these eggs because they are still in the nest! If you remove the eggs, she will just keep laying, so it is better to replace them with plastic dummy canary eggs. You can look for mail-order sources by using a search engine such as Google to find plastic canary eggs. Try to get light blue ones, not white or dark blue.
Real Canary Egg, Dummy Egg
If you want a hen to raise a second clutch, then you need to separate the chicks from her and let the male finish raising them while she starts incubating again. After raising the final clutch, replace the next round of eggs with plastic ones. You can throw away the fertile ones, or foster them to another hen to raise if you have a spare hen and want more chicks. However, limit each hen to feeding 2 clutches of chicks per year.
Realize that an egg could be fertile if the hen was in the same cage with a male at any time for up to two weeks before the egg was laid. Some canary pairs mate (tread) often, but others mate very briefly only at dawn, so just because you never witness it doesn't mean it never happened. Unless you kept the hen away from all possible male canaries, assume that her eggs could be fertile, so don't let her incubate actual eggs if you don't want them to develop.
After I am finished breeding a hen for the year, the way I get her to stop laying more eggs is:
After a few weeks, she will stop laying. Many people get upset when they see an occasional egg laid on the cage floor, but that just shows her body is still in breeding condition. It will not wear her out to lay the eggs as much as raising chicks, so if the food is low protein and she has plenty of room to fly, she will stop laying by summer when the days are longer if not sooner. Some people let her sit on the plastic eggs until she gives up and this is OK. I do that for a couple of weeks, then turn her loose in a big flight cage and take away the few eggs that are laid after that. Once she starts the summer molt, she will not lay eggs again until the following spring.
Other people do other things, although I do not recommend them. The most harmless method is to provide extra light to make the day length 15 hours or more. The idea is to start the summer molt sooner, but that can mess up the rest of the year and start the next breeding cycle earlier, especially for an indoor bird. So while this can work, it may create more problems later.
Another method which I've often read about is to pull out the tail feathers. The idea is to stress out the hen's body by forcing her to divert protein and energy into growing feathers instead of breeding. I think that trying to force a molt sooner than normal is again messing with nature and could cause more problems later. So, please don't do this!
The final solution is to take the hen to a vet for hormone injections. Lupron is leuprorelin acetate which inhibits the pituitary, reducing the hormones FSH and LH. I've heard of people giving this to a pet canary hen that was not bred and would not stop laying eggs. I think it is safer (and cheaper) to just let a canary hen build a nest and lay eggs, then sit on the infertile or exchanged dummy eggs for weeks. If always given a low protein diet, the egg laying cycles will naturally stop by summer and this drug approach should never be necessary.
To summarize, if you have a canary hen, keep her light schedule as close to the natural outside sunrise and sunset so she is only in breeding condition during the spring. Feed high (18%) protein food only if you want to breed her and only during the spring just before and during the laying of eggs that you want to be fertile, and while feeding live chicks. Give her a low (14%) protein diet the rest of the time and keep her in as large a cage as you can so she flys a lot. Diet and exercise, where have you heard that before?
Resources:
Zupreem Natural Small Bird pellets (14% protein)
Harrisons Adult Lifetime Super Fine pellets (14% protein)
Mazuri Small Bird Maintenance pellets (14% protein)
Harrisons High Potency Super Fine pellets (20% protein)