Duck eggs laid in our garden 🦆🥚

To run R scripts, the best practice is to first install R and then install RStudio.

• To Run the script that creates the year-by-year duck eggs table, open duck_eggs_table.R in RStudio.
• To Run the script that creates GIF of eggs layed by day, open duck_eggs_gif.R in RStudio.

Background

We brought home four few-day-old ducklings in 2020; two white crested ducks on April 10th and two khaki campbell ducks on May 14th. They started laying eggs in November and I've been collecting data on the quantity of eggs ever since. Here's a table about how many (female) ducks we've had laying eggs since, by month.

Number of Laying Ducks by Month and Year

Duck Breeds	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2020
White Crested Ducks	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	2	2
Khaki Campbell Ducks	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	2	2
-------------------	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2021
White Crested Ducks	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2
Khaki Campbell Ducks	2	2	2	2	2	2	1	1	1	1	1	1
-------------------	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2022
White Crested Ducks	2	2	2	2	2	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
Khaki Campbell Ducks	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
-------------------	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2023
White Crested Ducks	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
Khaki Campbell Ducks	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
Khaki / Buff Mix Ducks	0	0	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3

According to the American Poultry Association:

• White Cresteds lay 100-150 eggs per year
• Khaki Campbells lay 250-340 eggs per year
• Buff Orpingtons lay 150-220 eggs per year

But the actual data are so much more interesting!

Number of eggs laid by day

1. The following data points can provide some inference regarding the number of eggs laid by khakis versus crested ducks.

Year	Days where every duck laid an egg	Days with at least one egg laid
2021	110	254
2022	109	226
2023	95	316

• In the first two years, it is likely that our khakis laid near the lower end of the typical range (or even lower).
• It is likely that our white crested ducks lay within the expected range.

2. The R script duck_eggs_table.R provides a monthly view of eggs laid.

• These numbers account for the numbers of laying ducks we had each month.
• Therefore, this is not a straight average of eggs / # of laying ducks for the entire year.

3. The R script duck_eggs_gif.R uses data from the file data_eggs_laid.csv to generate the following GIF with two plots.

Note that this is not updated for 2023

• duck_eggs_gif.R is compatible with R v3, but is not compatible with the newer R v4.

Five Eggs in One Day? From Four Ducks?

I had read that ducks and chickens lay at most an egg per day. But experience taught me otherwise. Therefore, I embarked on further research and found that our ducks were not unique in this regard. Breeds such as our khaki campbells are known to sometimes lay more than one egg per day, until the young layers have their hormones stabilize.