1 in 10 collected eggs are bad?

[dustingebhardt]

I collect roughly 55 eggs per day from my shaded aviary where I have roughly 65 Jumbo coturnix. Roughly 10% of the eggs are bad when I crack them open. The bad eggs are a milky, reddish mess. Frequently, they smell foul, too. At first, I thought that this was because of the summer heat, but the summer heat is gone and I still have this issue. My oldest birds are "only" 9 months old, if that matters. Interestingly enough, I hard-boiled roughly 4 dozen eggs last night and none of them looked any different than expected when I made deviled eggs.

I'm trying to start up a small side business with the eggs, but I'm afraid that the bad eggs will negatively impact my sales.

My current thinking is that I'm just not finding every single egg every day. Perhaps some are buried in the deep litter when I collect the eggs each day and they later rise to the surface as the birds dig and scratch.

Is there a way to ID the bad eggs before I package them (for sale) or before I crack them open (for my own consumption)?

 

[Kiki]

Triple check for eggs a few times a day, once you are 100% sure you are collecting daily report back.

 

[Wezdin]

I know with chicken eggs you can do the float test, if it floats it is bad, if it sinks it is good. This would be hard to do with 50 eggs though.

 

[dustingebhardt]

I know with chicken eggs you can do the float test, if it floats it is bad, if it sinks it is good. This would be hard to do with 50 eggs though.

Not terribly difficult. I normally put all of my collected eggs in a bowl of water and wash off the stuck-on debris with a soft brush. I haven't noticed a lot of floating eggs and I've been following this same method for weeks. I do get an occasional floater (<1% of eggs collected), but usually this egg has a major defect in the shell or a hole.

 

[H@tcher]

Maybe try candling the eggs to see if you can pick out the bad ones. Looks like they would be different from the good ones.

I've had bad eggs before but don't remember a "red milky mess". Maybe just certain birds laying the bad ones.

 

[Fishkeeper]

If you're 100% sure those are all fresh eggs, I'd suspect something is wrong with some of your birds.
Post some pics of the setup and of the bad eggs.