Double for Your Trouble

Eggs.  Everyone is talking about eggs.  The price of eggs in the stores have people wringing their hands.  I heard today that Waffle House has increased their menu prices by $1 per egg.  What is this all about?  Well, last year due to 'bird flu' the government killed millions of egg layers.  Entire flocks were wiped out - regardless if they were infected or not.  How curious!  It seems natural that you would only destroy birds showing symptoms.  Why would you kill the survivors?  They have the antibodies to fight off the bird flu and thus could provide the answers to protection from further bird flu losses.  

We do have losses of our chickens, but not from bird flu.  Many from the #$%*! minks.  One the other day from a possum.  And one last week that had hopped up on a water trough to drink, fell in, and subsequently died of hypothermia.  The rest of the remaining flock is doing well and we're picking up between 12 and 20 eggs a day.

As I picked up eggs, something caught my eye in the nesting box.  It was a big egg.  A gargantuan egg.  Take a look:

I put it in the egg carton and it looked odd and out of place, like a peacock egg.  But we have no more peacocks, since Penelope, the pea hen was struck by a truck and succumbed to her injuries.

Look at how big that thing is!  Those other eggs in the carton are normal sized eggs.

I brought it in and showed Tricia.  I said, "Watch when you break this one.  I bet it is a double-yolk egg."  Sure enough!:

Double yolk eggs are said to bring good luck, but I don't believe in luck.  They occur when a hen releases two yolks in the same shell and is said to happen with a hen that has just started laying or an older hen at the end of her days.  As I watched the double yolk egg sizzle in the skillet, I wondered if you can incubate a double yolk egg.  I discovered that you can, but you shouldn't.  You're better off eating the egg like we did.  If you were able to hatch them, if any survived, they'd be small, undersized, and unhealthy.  We made the right call in eating the double yolk egg.  It was delicious!

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.