Sally ~ Layer of alien eggs

I don't know a lot about chooks but find our 'Sally Girl', as we call her, to be quite a fascinating character. Normally she is happy to get into her cage around 5pm each evening and then I go inside to cook dinner. However during the week she absolutely refused to go to bed so I left her for a while while I got the dinner on and went outside when it was almost dark to see where she was. I couldn't find her for a while and then I found her on top of the compost heap and when she saw me she very happily ran into her cage and settled down for the night or whatever that is in chook talk. I noticed though that she had just laid an egg and when I took it inside and had a look at it I saw that it was the weirdest egg I had ever seen....hence the description of an alien egg!

If I was Farmer Liz from Eight Acres or Sally from Jembella Farm, I would have known exactly why our Sally laid such an odd looking egg. However I knew that some of our Down to Earth Forum members would know so I posted a photo of the alien egg in the hope that they would diagnose what the problem was. I was wondering why a chook would lay an egg at 6pm when she normally lays her eggs in the morning and she did lay another egg the next morning by the way.

As it turned out, some of the members thought it was a 'Body checked egg' where the shell gets cracked during the calcification process and a layer of calcium is deposited over the crack before the egg is laid. How amazing is that? Did you know chooks were so clever?

I was given a link to the article Common Egg Quality Problems on Backyard Chickens.com and it is a very informative article. On reading through it I looked at the photo of a 'Slab sided or flat sided egg' in No.11 in that article and I think that is much the same shape of egg. Causes of these problems don't seem to apply to Sally though unless she had a fright. Other causes are overcrowding and stress apparently but she has the life of Riley and wanders around all day digging in my veggies and spreading mulch all over the backyard.

I have had to scout around to find anything sturdy enough to cover my seedlings to stop her digging around them so the garden looks a bit more strange than usual these days.

 

So if you keep chooks and know what is wrong with this egg do let me know. The egg Sally laid the next morning was perfectly normal. I would love to know why she laid an egg so late in the day. There is nothing around to frighten her apart from next door's cats that roam around our yard all the time but she would be used to them by now. It's all a mystery to me ;-)

Autumn arrived with a cool breeze from down south during the week and I am starting to think about digging out the winter clothes. The nights are getting chilly and the days warm up but I think we have said goodbye to our 30C days of the past few weeks. The CEO has got his gardening mojo back and is doing some much overdue weeding so next week I hope I will have room to plant more seedlings and put a fence around them for protection  from our Sally girl. Who would have thought one chook could do so much damage. LOL!