Abnormally large eggs

[nychicken]

I have a "mutt" chicken has been laying large eggs. Slightly larger than jumbo. I just went out to gather the day's offerings and found an egg that measures 3.5" long and 7" around. Has anyone had a girl lay eggs this big? Do I need to be concerned about her? I hurt just looking at this egg!

 

[delfargo]

congratulations! that's one helluvan egg.
never "measured" any of mine, but i had a few that weighed in at 2.75 onces.
i wouldn't be concerned about the chicken, i'd be happy about the XXL egg.

 

[lebentier]

they may be double yolkers. have you opened them?

 

[nychicken]

No double yolks...but I haven't cracked open the monster egg yet

 

[chrisd1234]

I found one very similar in size about 10 months ago, I was out of town for 4 days and when I went to ckeck the eggs this giant egg was in the nesting box. Some how a very small hole was in the egg, and it had dried up on the inside, so it was very light in weight. I still am not sure who layed it, but a hen that large must have opened up the door to hen house to get in to lay it. I am glad to know I am not the only one to experience this. I looked around for a camera when I found , I thought perhaps this was some kind of joke on me.

 

[Mac in Wisco]

We have a few thousand hens here and occasionally find huge eggs. Out of a few thousand eggs a day we run into a quarter-pound egg every couple of days. It doesn't seem to hurt any of them.

 

[3goodeggs]

What type of chicken is it? Mine are orpingtons, and about 1/3 of them give me very big eggs.

3oz is abnormal? wow. I guess I should go hug my chickens. I call them"leveling device eggs" because it makes the arrow on the egg scale go way up to the print on the top of the scale.
I am still waiting for a double yolker, now I guess I better hope the poor girls don't.

small detour, please forgive:
Mac, out of curiosity, what do you all do with the small eggs or the extra large eggs or the ones that have a spot or a weird shape? I have brown layers, but none of the eggs are ever the same. I assume to get identical eggs in a carton, a bunch must need to be... I dunno, 'something' done with them.
also, I have noticed that size and weight are not always the same. I can have a large light egg, and a smaller denser heavier egg. how does that work?

 

[Mac in Wisco]

Quote:
We keep close tabs on the amount of protein we are feeding them to keep egg size growing ever so slightly throughout the production cycle. Too little protein and it hurts production, too much protein and the egg size increases rather quickly. Ideally we want to keep the flock average egg size at Large as long as possible as the greatest consumer demand is for the Large egg and we get the best pay price for shipments that average out at Large. Our co-op sells medium, large, extra large, and jumbos in cartons, although I think most of the jumbos go to the breaker plant to be made into egg products.

We only get small eggs at the start of the production cycle. We separate those out and either give them away to our neighbors or deliver cases of them to the Salvation Army. As the egg size progresses we get more and more Jumbo and Super Jumbo eggs. We carton some of these up for direct sales from the farm and in town.

Odd shaped, thin shelled, and spotted eggs are packed up separately. Sometimes we give them to the Salvation Army and sometimes they go to the egg processing plant with the rest of the eggs. If the co-op is short on eggs they will take these eggs and send them to the breaker to be make into egg products like bulk egg whites or egg yolks, versus sending good shell eggs to the breaker.

 

[cmom]

Last week I got a huge egg. It was a double yolk egg inside a double yolk egg, 4 yolks...

 

[Country Heart]

I've never measured my eggs, but did have a triple yolker one time. It was HUGE, from my first year Delaware.