Gigantic egg laid today - 116.7 grams!

I have heard that plain yogurt is a favorite treat of alot of chickens- perhaps they could enjoy something like that...I bet they will live a much happier life in your care. Perhaps the BIG eggs are a way of showing appreciation.

They are getting plenty of treats.... right now I've been giving them baby food (meat mixed with veggie) with some oatmeal thrown in. I had been throwing down wheat and cracked corn in their run, but even though they pecked at it I don't think they were actually able to pick up much.

The big problem is stuffing the new debeaked girls while not turning the 6 "regular" old girls into rolling lardbutts. The regular girls are of course at the top of the pecking order, so demand first dibs at any food. I've kind of solved that by fixing up TWO bowls of treats, putting one bowl down first out in the run for the regular girls, then once they're eating I put the 2nd bowl inside the coop for the special girls. Yesterday I had a cantaloupe I shared with them, they get all the seeds and guts, plus for the special girls I minced up some of the flesh. For the regular girls I just gave them a big slice of melon to peck at along with their bowl of "guts". From what little I've been able to research about debeaked chickens is that you need to feed them from a deep container so they can scoop food out, so I have a couple of dollar store plastic trays I keep filled with food for them. Right now I'm feeding them Nutrena Meatbird crumbles mixed with a little Purina Layena, plus I sometimes add some wheat or cracked corn to that, as well as some Chick Ultrakibble I had left over.

Yesterday I finally got around to putting leg bands (zip ties) on them so I can tell them apart. On the skinniest ones, I do believe that their crops weighed more than the bird! On one of them the crop was easily the size of a baseball. And it seems that all of the debeaked ones lay larger than normal eggs, all of them are a minimum of extra large size, with about 30% of them jumbo size
My "regular" girls lay mostly large, with about 20% extra large.

Peewee - less than 42 grams
Small - at least 42 grams
Medium - at least 49 grams
Large - at least 56 grams
Extra Large - at least 64 grams
Jumbo - 70 grams or more