A Crazy Assortment of Eggs

The chickens are gradually starting to lay more and more after the normal winter dormancy brought about by reduced daylight hours and less nutrition out on the pasture for them to eat.  In Late December and early January, we gather maybe an egg or two a day.  On a good day we'll pick up three.  However, in February, it's like a switch gets turned on and suddenly you'll pick up nine eggs, a dozen the next day and two dozen the next.

A dozen and a half eggs today

We pick up an odd assortment of eggs sometimes.  Our brown egg layers, Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds, and our Aracaunas, that lay blue and green eggs make a pretty, colorful basket.  In the photo below you can see on the far left an egg that was surely the first egg laid by a Barred Rock or Rhode Island Red pullet.  We call them pullet bullets.  They start off very small, but soon they are normal size.

Pullet's first egg (left), Aracauna egg (middle), Barred Rock or RIR egg (right)

Here's another odd thing to see.  Benjamin has a abnormally large egg in his right hand and an abnormally small egg in his left.  As we discussed, the small one is a pullet's first egg.  The big one, well, it looks like that might have hurt coming out! The hen walking funny tomorrow will be the tell tale sign that she laid it.

Big & Small

Here's another picture that highlights the difference in size.  If you crack open the small egg, you find that the yolk is the size of a normal yolk.  There's not much 'white' in the little pullet egg.

But what do you find in the large egg.  I had a suspicion, but I wanted to know for sure, so we cracked it open.

Yep, sure enough, it was a double-yolked egg.  What causes this?  I learned that it is pretty rare in store bought eggs, because they are candled and double-yolkers are discarded.  So if you buy your eggs from a store, you may never see one.  If you have hens, you'll see some, although they are still pretty rare.  Some of it is hereditary, but some of it is similar to a car back-firing.  It is a mistake or mis-firing in which the ovary releases the yolk into the oviduct.  Sometimes the yolks are released too close together resulting in a double yolked egg.

Double-yolked egg

Double-yolked eggs are safe to eat, but we fed this one to the dogs since it had a tinge of blood in it. I also read that sometimes pullets will lay the small eggs and then lay a huge double-yolk egg before their egg laying system gets into a normal groove.  You know how it goes?  Sometimes we experience some 'glitches' in our system.