egg binding?

[esdad]

I've been keeping chickens for a couple of years and have successfuly dealt with this problem in the past. One of my chickens passed away today and upon finding her it felt like she had a baseball stuck in her. I did an at home necropsy and found a normal size egg covered by a hard rubbery stuff that looked similar to fat. This was at least a 1/4" thick and it was impacted to the uterine wall. Any ideas to what happened?
Thanks in adbance.

 

[Wynette]

That would be commonly called internal laying. It's much more common with high-output hens such as production-type birds, or hatchery rhode island reds, barred rocks, etc. - those bred for high numbers of eggs.

What typically will happen is the egg will eventually break, and the insides will cause infection - the hen ends up dying from infection. I'm sorry for you loss, and glad you did a necropsy. It's always a good thing to try to learn from these situations as you did. Not that you could have done anything differently, though, to prevent it.