Egg Color Question

[Frazzemrat1]

I know, I don't have a pic, but I'll get one tonight... My question is this; I have two hamburgs. One Silver Spangled and one Gold Spangled. The Silver started laying first, by several weeks, and she has the cutest little white eggs. The gold started laying, and she lays the cutest little *cream* to pink eggs. Her ears are white, everything I've read is that hamburgs lay white eggs.... but her eggs are definitely not white. Thoughts?

 

[N F C]

I know, I don't have a pic, but I'll get one tonight... My question is this; I have two hamburgs. One Silver Spangled and one Gold Spangled. The Silver started laying first, by several weeks, and she has the cutest little white eggs. The gold started laying, and she lays the cutest little *cream* to pink eggs. Her ears are white, everything I've read is that hamburgs lay white eggs.... but her eggs are definitely not white. Thoughts?

The first thought that popped into my head is that maybe your gold isn't a full breed, maybe she's a mix?

Here's a link to the breed focus on Hamburgs...there are some links to threads in the first post that might help you find someone with a lot of experience with them:
chicken-breed-focus-hamburg.1053788

 

[Ridgerunner]

Yes, Hamburgs are supposed to lay a white egg, but you are looking at them. You want thoughts though so I’ll give you some.

First, there is no genetic link between ear lobe color and egg shell color. It’s true that most breeds with white ear lobes lay white eggs and most with red ear lobes lay brown eggs, but most doesn’t mean all. There are some breeds (phoenix and penedesenca for example) that don’t follow that rule. It depends on what the people that created that breed wanted and to a certain extent, what they had to work with. When you get mixed breed chickens all that flies out of the window. I’ve had plenty of mutt chickens with white ear lobes that laid brown eggs. Yours have white ear lobes, good, they are supposed to. That has nothing to do with shell color.

There is one gene pair that determines if your base shell color is white or blue. That’s straight-forward, yours are white.

Brown is pigment added to a base white egg shell. There are a lot of different genes that affect brown, that’s why you can get so many different shades, it just depends on which one is present. Most of those add pigment to the outside of the shell, sort of like a car going through a spray paint shop. You can sandpaper that coating off and see the color underneath. Or when you crack an egg remove the membrane and look at the inside of the shell. Most of the time that shows pure white with brown eggs.

But at least one of those “brown” genes is not added at the last minute so it cannot be scraped off. Instead it is mixed in with the shell material as it is deposited around the egg. It’s the same color on the inside as if you scrape any extra coating off. Since you describe her egg as pink or cream it’s pretty possible this gene is the cause. But unless you scrape it or check inside it could be some different brown egg gene.

Somewhere in that hen’s ancestry one of more brown egg shell gene made its way into the gene pool and has been passed down. Stuff like that is a lot more common than many people believe.