GCC can't stop laying eggs, old methods not working anymore

[crookedbird]

I have a female GCC named Poe. She has a mate- we thought they were both male when I bought Poe until she started laying eggs. I had problems with her laying eggs every few months even after doing what the vet recommended (keep the food bowl less full, give them 12 hours of darkness to simulate winter). Last year, I decided to just give her a nest box, hoping that raising chicks would stop the pattern. It worked: she laid 6 eggs, broke the first 3 before beginning incubation, and 2 of the surviving eggs hatched and were raised lovingly by my conure pair until they were old enough to be safely separated. She didn't have any more eggs for a year and a half. About a month ago, I got lazy about nighttime hours for my birds and Poe started laying again. I gave her another nest box, she laid her first 3 eggs in or off of her food bowl before she started laying them in the box. She is now on egg number TEN. I'm very worried about her health. She's trying to incubate them all (she broke 4 and 2 were duds but I replaced them all with fakes that she believes are real). I checked on the remaining real eggs and at least 2 are growing, so my hope is that in a worst-case scenario, she'll stop laying when an egg hatches, but she's laying one egg every 3 days, so she'll be losing even more nutrients regularly until then. I'm supplementing her water with a little bit of calcium, but it's very hard to get her (or her mate, who is feeding her) to eat veggies and they've never touched a cuttlebone. She laid egg number ten in her food bowl, which makes me think maybe she knows she's not supposed to have so many, but she can't stop. What can I do to help her? I'm worried that taking the nest box and eggs away from her will just make her keep laying to replace the eggs, which is what she did when she first started laying and I didn't give her fake eggs as a replacement.

 

[bonitabird59]

take away the nest box and her partner. get rid of anything that can be interpreted as a 'nest'. when my budgie was laying eggs in her food bowl, I swapped her food bowl for foraging toys that made her work her food out of boxes and this helped significantly. do not let her raise any more birds. it is a really bad idea to raise birds that have unknown genetics. I would strongly recommend taking ur bird to the vet and having a professional determine what to do, but for the time being I would do as stated above.