Brown egg layers eggs getting paler

[MamaFix3]

My Brown sex-link hen started out laying nice brown eggs, she is only a year and a half old now and all of a sudden her eggs are getting pale, her eggs are now a tan color instead of the darker color she layed when we 1st bought her what is causing this?? Any ideas/advice???

 

[Ridgerunner]

Sounds normal. Hens store pigment to color their eggs before they start to lay and again during the molt. The first eggs either when they first start to lay or start after a molt, will be as nice and dark as thy ever will be. But the more they use up that stored pigment, the lighter the eggs can become. How fast those eggs get lighter depends on how much brown they are using up and what they are eating that may restore that pigment.

 

[MamaFix3]

Thanks a lot for the info! Is there anything I can give her to help, I let them free range but only when I'm outside (we have a big hawk problem) I give them kitchen scraps and they eat grass/clover what foods restore pigment?

 

[Ridgerunner]

I don’t know what you can feed them to keep the egg shells browner but it is something that I see with my eggs every summer.

It’s not that rare to get an unusually white egg, then the color to go back to normal. That brown color is put on during the last few hours in the hen’s internal egg laying factory. If something frightens her and causes her to lay the egg early, it can be a lot lighter than normal. But this is not an everyday thing. It’s unusual.