I wish I had more time to write on egg formation, it is soooo fascinating! Alas, I have but a few minutes to post. Lucky you.
Yolks develop in a chicken days ahead of time and you can actually pull out a string of eggs in different stages of development, but I had never seen it. Our meat birds haven’t reached maturity when we kill them and we usually do not butcher our layers as they are so scrawny.
These yolks were pulled out of our neighbor’s chicken that was attacked by a dog this morning(Yes, Kristy, one of yours. The water treatment guy brought his dog to work with him, the dog jumped out and immediately took down the chicken) and Paul’s Dad offered to take it home and butcher it up for Mr. C…gross, I know. You can see in the pictures what he found inside the hen along with a lot more yolks in line with these. Here are 6 days worth of eggs. The day before the egg is laid, it gets fertilized, well ours do because we have a roo, and the night before it is laid, the egg gets it’s shell put on and as soon as it starts to harden the chickens lays it, blunt end first, in the morning.
Our goofy birds have forgotten to put shells on their eggs before and there sits an egg, only in the membrane! Quite odd.
Below is a picture my friend Kim sent this morning.
I feel sorry for that poor thing.
Surprisingly there was only one yolk in this egg, but it did have an egg in an egg. If you look closely there are two egg shells, one inside of the other.
We also had a four yolker about 13 yrs ago. It was a huuuge egg and the chicken died, poor thing.
There you have it folks, a bunch of worthless chicken facts to crowd out that worthwhile knowledge in your brain.
4 comments:
Aww, poor chicken! Thanks for posting this info, very interesting. Did the chicken get attacked because it was in the yard or did the dog jump the fence into the chicken yard?
OK, now that's just gross;) But my kids were fascinated, they've started the "let's get chickens" begging. They do that about once a year but having been raised around chickens I'm not sure I'm ready for the smell you get during a looong, hot southern summer.
Meila was very excited about these eggs. Samantha was interested though slightly sicked out. I thoght it was very cool and even forced Jeff to come and check it out. Thank you for your Oology lesson. I can't wait for more in the future.
I love the pictures of your family.....some of them I could pick out in a crowd and know they were yours...so cute.And the list of books on your nitestand.....almost the same as mine!
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