Now and then our hens lay us a soft egg. Most often it takes them by surprise and drops out in the middle of the night when they’re perched on the roosting bars.
When that happens, the shell is soft enough for it to slip straight through the roosting bars and into the litter trays so we don’t find it until we clean them out at the weekend. Today, though, whoever laid the defunct egg managed to do it in the nest, so it landed safely and had nowhere to run away to. That meant we could pick it up.
We’ve never held one before, and I can tell you now it’s a curious thing. The skin is rubbery and very pliable. So much so that you can safely squeeze it with your fingers and it feels like a balloon full of water. The actual surface is rubbery and powdery.
The rubbery soft egg can be squeezed
On this one there is also some evidence of the egg not having formed properly inside the hen, leaving one end wrinkled and creased.
Fortunately it’s not something to be overly worried about as it’s a fairly rare occurrence in our little flock, but we’ll certainly be keeping our eyes out for any more.
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We have had a few of those, but not had one for a while. Actually we are still not getting many eggs anyway – either it’s the weather or our hens are getting a bit past it!
Our egg count is well down, Mark. At the moment, from our three birds, we’re getting a grand total of one egg a day between them. We’re having to save them up until the weekends so we have enough for breakfasts, so no egg sandwiches at work.
It is most likely because of the shorter days, but even so I would have expected things to start picking up now that the sun isn’t going down quite so early.
this usually happens in older birds, or pullets as they are coming onto lay and establishing their cycle – put simply sometimes the system releases two yolks close together so they will either make two eggs or a double yolker – if they lay two eggs the same day they can not get a shell onto the second in the time they have before it must be laid – it normally settles down.
We just got 2 of those, 1 two days in a row- 1 was inside the box, one just outside. We have 4 hens. Sometimes we find 3 eggs, sometimes 1. I was afraid they have a vitamin/ mineral deficiency.
A couple of nights ago my mum, Jo went to go and check for eggs from our 5 chickens in our back garden.When she looked there was an egg, so like normal she picked it up.To her surprize it was a soft shelled egg!She showed us all the egg she had found and we were all amazed!I took it into school the next day and all my friends were amazed too!Tonight i am going to take it into the brownies i go to.i think they will be surprized too!