Egg Oddities Part II

I can still remember when we first got chickens.  Tricia tells me it was 2006.  We had a few hens in a chicken tractor in the back pasture before it was a pasture.  We waited and waited for them to begin laying.  Every day we would check the laying boxes.  Finally, one day Tricia walked out and checked and... there were eggs!  She left them where they were and when Benjamin got home from school, she showed him.  She took a picture of him finding the eggs.  He was so excited.

It is still exciting checking the egg boxes.  Fresh laid eggs are pretty to look at and we definitely enjoy eating them.  I wake up too early to eat eggs for breakfast on the weekdays, but on weekends, we always eat eggs.  This Saturday, when checking the egg boxes, I discovered a neat egg. 

Looks like a normal egg, doesn't it?  Except normal eggs don't do this...

Growing up, I had a "Stretch Armstrong."  Do you remember those?  You could grab his arms and pull and he would stretch like he was made of rubber.  Well, this eggs was sort of like Stretch Armstrong.  It was like a rubber egg.  I could squeeze it into a rectangle.

Or even a square...

It's as if the egg shell never hardened and just had rubber instead of the shell.  So what causes this to happen? 

One of the reasons is that sometimes young pullets that just begin laying eggs don't have it all together yet.  There is some sort of kink in the works while their bodies are figuring out this whole egg-laying trick.  All of our hens are old, so it can't be this.

Stress can cause this.  Years ago, we had some neighbor kids that would come over and chase the chickens.  The chickens would be so stressed out when they would leave, that their egg-laying went way down for the next couple of days, but I don't recall this leading to "rubber eggs."  Plus, we've had no one chasing hens around, so it can't be this.

If your hens have a calcium deficiency, they can lay thin-shelled eggs.  I'm not sure about "rubber" ones.  Anyway, we have free-choice oyster shells for them to eat at will, so I don't think it is a calcium deficiency.

I read that a Vitamin D deficiency can cause hens to lay eggs with soft shells.  I'm leaning on this being the cause.  The shorter days in the winter along with a string of gloomy, cloudy days with no sun could have contributed to this, although we do feed them hen scratch mixed with laying pellets, which I'm pretty sure has Vitamin D in it.

At any rate, collecting 'rubber' eggs is a rarity.  We don't get many of them.  I think it is just an anomaly.  It is kind of neat to hold in your hand, though we don't eat them when we find them.