June 13, 2017
Eggs of Giants
One cool thing about keeping a flock of chickens (aside from the 5am alarms) is that they pop eggs out!
Before we had chickens, I thought all eggs were white and exactly the same size and shape. With the first time our Buff Orpington hen announced to the world that she plopped a smooth, clean, egg in the nest box, my preconceived notions about eggs were shattered.
It was BROWN!
It was TINY!
This giant, beautiful 6 pound hen had laid an egg that may have weighed 3 grams (okay, maybe a little bigger than that). It didn’t have a yolk! Maybe our chickens were broken. Of course, they weren’t broken. Most heavy breeds lay brown eggs. Buff Orpingtons are heavy breeds. Most first eggs are small and even the most proficient layers occasionally have an egg without a yolk. They never did lay what I previously thought of as “normal” eggs, instead they were huge eggs (extra-large) with the occasional super-giant egg containing two yolks.
Currently, we have a rainbow of large chickens in our flock. Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds, and Plymouth Barred Rocks lay various shades of brown eggs (actually, pale apricot to medium walnut brown) and some have speckles! Our Easter Eggers lay green, pale pink, and occasionally spotted eggs. We also ended up with some White Leghorns, who are smaller than the others, but lay extra-large white eggs. Our Golden Phoenix (who is a mottled English walnut color with a ring of golden feathers around her neck and scattered about her dark head) lays a torpedo-shaped almost pink egg 6 of the 7 days in a week. Just like each of us are unique, each hen lays an egg with her own distinct size, shape, and color!
Young pullets (a female chicken is a pullet until she starts steadily laying eggs) will sometimes start out producing small eggs for the first week or so. In the picture, we had a new layer’s tiny, a “regular” sized, and a double-yolker from our White Leghorn.
Another fun thing about having chickens is observing the variety of egg colors and shades when packing our eggs in their cartons. We have at least one white and one green in each dozen but most of our hens lay an assortment of pink-brown shades called “brown” eggs. They say you can tell what color a chicken will lay by the bottoms of their feet! (In our experience, not exactly, but pretty close) In our last batch of biddies, we had three with blackish green “soles” of their feet. The girls are hoping to find a dark olive egg or maybe even a purple egg!
Yes, the girls name our chickens. These names (usually for attributes or specific colors) usually find themselves playing hens or pullets in the Adventures of Long Tail. Sometimes their creative names end up inspiring an actual story character (like Jasmine Rose in The Devonians).
The girls’ favorite part of chickens is the raising challenge. They enjoy plotting color mixes as they separate them for breeding, watching the incubator for 21 days and squealing “babies are coming soon,” tending new hatchlings, encouraging them to explore, helping them grow, and seeing their breeding experiment results as they become pullets and cockerels. Then they usually say goodbye to newly laying pullets about 18 – 26 weeks or promising-looking cockerels about 10 – 14 weeks as they prefer to sell them when they are “past the danger stage.” (aka too big for most hawks and no longer needing brooder care)
I love their learning adventure (as Rebeccah says, breeding in chickens is more colorful than Mendel’s peas) and we all enjoy the rainbow of eggs in various sizes the happy hens provide.
Thanks for reading!
Type at you next time,
~Nancy Tart
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