Another - My Chicken Laid a Boiled Egg - mystery post

[canne50]

I just added a post about hard eggs. The only difference is mine were in a shiny gathering pail left out in full sun.
Thank you for postings of your experiences. I know I’m not crazy!

 

[PsychoChickenLady]

I searched Ms. Google and the mystery appears to have been posted and head scratched on BackyardChickens previously.

View attachment 3575786

How the what-why did my chicken lay a boiled egg?

Scene: (law-and-order sound)
Morning egg eating time. I choose two eggs off the end of the spiral counter display, crack one over the butter simmer- it plops, and I ewwwwww.
Next egg, same shellish thing. I start spinning eggs willy-nilly thinking the wife mixed up some boilys, but she enters and adamantly denies. The eggs are two different colors, so definitely different chickens.

The wife conveniently starts to remember recently finding a couple strays off coop-campus, and attests to verifying the color of the allegedly errant drops.

Now, this is the State of Arizona, and while rampant newsperson conjecture speculates temperatures "hot enough to boil an egg on a politician's face," 112 F'ing degrees is actually not sizzilly enough to do such a thing. However, it should now be noted that the secret stash was situated upon scattered straw laying over one open-air, compost pile, a method of sorts that could cause the ambient air above and possibly said normally temperate eggs to reach plus 150 F'ing degrees, the very condition that the eggs in question could presumably soft boil, and in all truthful terms, the known temperature at which the aforementioned politician's pants do indeed catch fire.

This is hilarious from start to finish. Particularly the comments and responses.

I just watched my hen lay a hard boiled egg yesterday (March 17, 2024). No lie. (No scam or farce either ~ or LeprechaunLuckyCharm, ). I'm actually posting about it later this morning, @PsychoChickenLady.

I'm curious for an update on your EGGSperiment and condition of your flock.

While lacking a few markers, I am concerned that what my hen laid was a #LashEgg. (Tagging because I'm really surprised that I haven't come across this suggestion within your thread).

Have you posted elsewhere about your experience? I would love to follow the story.

 

[NatJ]

As an aside, I found a stray egg outside our run. (The flock is let out a couple hours each day.) It was found in the shade of an elevated garden bed, that is moistened 3x a day from drip running through the garden. I cracked it open to find it had already started developing-- no brooder required.

Now I want to see an egg hatch on its own - no broody mama or incubator required!

Yea, I know that wouldn't work, the egg won't turn itself and therefore won't develop properly, but man, that it even develops as much as it does is crazy to think about.

I'm a bit late to the thread, but I HAVE read of eggs that hatched without being deliberately incubated.

For example, in the book The Dollar Hen, by Milo Hastings, 1911
Available here on Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13254/13254-h/13254-h.htm

Quote:
"In the season of 1901 hatched chickens were commonly found in cases of market eggs, throughout the trans-Mississippi region"

The whole book is about how to raise chickens to produce good eggs and make a profit. The bit about hatched chicks is in the section that talks about how to properly store eggs that will be sold for eating-- customers are not going to pay good prices for eggs that are not in good condition, and with no refrigeration the summer's heat was a big problem.

As regards whether eggs need turning: some will develop and hatch even with no turning.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/do-not-turn-eggs-what-do-you-think.32715/
This thread has the text of an article from 1998, saying that turning is not essential for hatching eggs (actually, someone is arguing that turning doesn't help at all). Various people chime in to the thread to give their experiences of when turning did or did not seem to be needed.

 

[Chicken_tiger_catt]

Meanwhile, in Ohio…….. 30 degrees F.