Backyard Chickens

Finally! Our fifth hen – the recalcitrant one – has laid her first egg. Her two sisters, presumably hatch-mates, have been laying for a month or more, but this girl has taken her time about getting down to work. And, even so, she’s a bit of a slow learner.

Her very first effort was very small and almost perfectly round. About ping pong ball size. I think the shape has to do with her internal laying mechanism which is probably not fully developed. We’ve had other layers who have begun with smallish, odd-shaped eggs and practice seems to have made perfect.

(And right here, I’d like to interrupt this story with a news report I recently saw on the e-version of the U.K.’s Daily Mail. It began, “A hen called Ping Pong laid a one-in-a-billion perfectly round egg – which has now sold on eBay for £480.” I didn’t read the rest. I was too busy figuring out what that came to in dollars. If my math is right, it comes to $738.84 – as of today.)

Anyway, until this latest little gem showed up in the nest box, we’d never before been presented with a yolk-less egg. Or, to be perfectly accurate, an egg with just a trace of yolk – which probably indicates she’s trying her best! (Of course, if I’d known I could do the e-bay trick, I’d have never cracked it open.) Since the yolk is where the nutrients are and is meant to supply a developing chick with whatever it needs to grow big and strong, it’s a good thing none of the girls has gone broody. Were someone to have sat on this particular egg, she would have been sorely disappointed. Eggs without yolks cannot hatch.

Almost Yolkless

Once upon a time, these yolkless eggs were believed to have been laid by roosters. They were called “cock eggs.” They are also known as “dwarf” eggs (for obvious reasons) or “wind eggs” (from the former belief that they resulted from conception by the wind – right up there with storks dropping human babies down the chimney!)

But, I keep going back to the basic chicken/egg question: Why would anyone pay £480 for a round egg?