Extra small egg

Gathering eggs is a fun thing to me.  It is Russ' daily job which will be assumed by Benjamin when Russ moves off to college.  Although fun to me, it probably isn't Russ' idea of entertainment.  I see it sort of like fishing.  You don't know how many you'll get, where you'll find them, or how many you'll get on any particular day.

A half dozen in one nest

We collect them in a wire basket as that lessens the likelihood of breakage, but let's be honest, we're dealing with eggs.  We experience breakage from time to time.  Sometimes we fall and break them, but most often the broken eggs are caused by nosy animals knocking over the basket or head-butting the basket. 


Egg Basket

Ever so often, we come across some oddities while collecting eggs.  The other day I showed you a soft egg that was weird.  Today we have another odd egg - a very, very small egg!  This happens ever so often.  The photo below shows the tiny chicken egg right next to a normal-sized egg, so you can see the scale.  The small egg is maybe an inch and an eighth long.

You'll notice it is an Aracauna egg.  These are the hens that lay blue and green eggs.  The small egg, however, has nothing to do with the breed as we've collected plenty of small brown eggs layed by Barred Rock hens and Rhode Island Red hens. 


Very small egg

Here is another one that I picked up on another day from a brown-egg layer that I've placed a penny beside it for perspective.  These are strange little boogers!


Little bitty egg

So what causes this?  Inquiring minds want to know!

This is actually called a "Fart Egg."  Not appetizing, I know.  They are also known as a "wind egg" if you want to be nice and proper.  Sometimes they are a pullet's first effort at egg laying.  In mature hens, they are caused when a piece of reproductive tissue inside the hen (the lining of the oviduct) breaks off and fools the glands that produce eggs.  The glands think that the mass of tissue is a yolk and starts forming an egg around it, wrapping it in albumen, membrane and shell!

The real question is, "Is a fart egg safe to eat?"  I think if you don't mind eating something called a fart egg, it is fine.  We eat ours.  There will be no yolk in the egg so it will be only the egg white.  These would be helpful in a recipe that calls for just egg whites.  You could save up a bunch of 'fart eggs' and save all kinds of time spent separating out the yolk!