Freak Eggs

Our chickens have been laying for over a month now, and it's still so exciting to go down to the coop, open up the side door of the hen house, and look in the nesting boxes for eggs.  Especially now that we're getting freak eggs!  You open up that little yellow door and you never know what you're going to find.

About a week after our first couple chickens started laying, we found this egg:

I walked into the kitchen that morning to get my coffee, saw that egg sitting on the counter, and wondered, "Why is it so pale?  And what are those speckles?"  So I poked the egg to see if the speckles were part of the shell or just some dirt... and it was squishy!  The egg was squishy because there was NO SHELL.  It was a perfectly formed egg - which we know because we cut it open to check - it just never formed a hard shell.  My mom said she found another egg without a shell the next morning, but it broke inside the hen house before she could collect it.  So gross.

Our chickens have been laying eggs in a huge variety of sizes, shapes, and colors:

The top left egg is very pale and very small, and it's obviously a freak egg because it has a little nipple on the top.  I mean seriously, that's just not right.  I think it was the very first egg for one of our chickens and took her by surprise, because I found it in the sand outside the hen house.  When I found it, I told the chickens, "Whoever did this, this is incorrect.  Try again."  They keep trying every day, but they still don't quite have it down yet.

Look at the top right egg in the picture above.  It's huge!  And guess what we found inside it...

Two yolks!  We found another giant egg a few days later and it was a double-yoker too!  I measured two of the eggs collected that day, and the regular brown egg was about 2 inches long.  The freak egg was almost 3 inches long!  I suspect Mary Lou is responsible for the huge eggs, not only because she is a Brahma (which is a bigger chicken that lays bigger eggs), but also because she herself is a freak.  It only makes sense for a freak chicken to lay freak eggs, but what do I know?

Here is a whole carton of eggs we've collected:

Now that our chickens' systems are in full gear, we've been getting one to three eggs every day, and we've filled up this one-and-a-half-dozen carton about three times in the past month.  We like to save them up until the weekend and then have a special breakfast with just our chickens' eggs.  We've actually heard the chickens laying eggs, and it's hilarious.  They start honking and squawking and fussing... then it stops as suddenly as it started.  The chicken emerges from the hen house like nothing even happened, and then there's a warm egg left in the nesting box.