Green eggs and ham, anyone? (Duck egg with VERY GREEN eggwhite!)

[OneEggToRuleThemAll]

Hi everyone! Hope y'all are doing great!

Today, I hard boiled about 10 of our duck's eggs. I have four duck hens, and one of them lays green eggs always (she's a runner). However, today, after hard boiling the eggs and peeling them all, one of my runner's eggs had GREEN EGGWHITE THE SAME COLOR AS THE SHELL. What on earth? I had already boiled it and it did NOT have an off smell. How freaking weird! The internets say the egg has pseudomonas bacteria. Of course, we didn't eat it (I threw it back to the ducks).

Has anyone ever seen this before? All the other eggs seemed fine...I sure hope so, anyway, because my kids ate a bunch of them before I found the green egg.

Thoughts? (Trying to post a photo...coming soon.)

 

[OneEggToRuleThemAll]

 

[OneEggToRuleThemAll]

Gross, eh?

 

[Canadian Wind]

 

[Yardmom]

What types of things are your ducks eating? Do they free range or have access to acorns?

 

[Jenbirdee]

interesting

 

[OneEggToRuleThemAll]

What types of things are your ducks eating? Do they free range or have access to acorns?

My runner definitely forages more than the rest of my ducks. She is always eating bugs and slugs and even sometimes little lizards. All my ducks forage in their 1000 square feet duck pen, and I grow lots of plants in there (sweet potatoes, tithonia, pumpkins, flowering weeds, etc.).

But...they all forage, and my runner always has, and this has never happened before. I feel like if it was food related, there'd be more than just one green egg?

ETA: They don't have access to acorns.

 

[BigBlueHen53]

Isn't pseudomonas highly contagious? Was it safe to feed that egg back to the other ducks? Maybe it was okay because the egg was cooked? Sorry, not judging, this is new to me and I'm wanting to learn. And I'm a dyed-in-the-wool worrywart so I'd want to know in case I ever see something like this, thanks!

 

[OneEggToRuleThemAll]

Isn't pseudomonas highly contagious? Was it safe to feed that egg back to the other ducks? Maybe it was okay because the egg was cooked? Sorry, not judging, this is new to me and I'm wanting to learn. And I'm a dyed-in-the-wool worrywart so I'd want to know in case I ever see something like this, thanks!

Well, I had boiled the egg for 7 minutes, so I imagine that killed any bacteria. And my ducks do eat their own poop, along with slugs and dead lizards and all kinds of crazy weird stuff. They also have a body temperature of 107.5F, so I think that makes them almost immune to all these gross bacteria.

But, I probably wouldn't have fed it back to them if I was thinking bacterial contamination. There was no off-smell, so I initially thought maybe the green pigment of the shell somehow made it into the eggwhite, and that this was a pigment thing and not a bacterial thing. If I could go back in time, I think I would just throw the egg in the trash (gross!), but I think my duckies will be okay. I'm not even sure they ate it...they seem to be super picky eaters, lol, and when things taste weird to them, they don't eat it. Like bananas, for example. My ducks eat papaya, watermelon, honeydew, soft apples, etc...but they won't touch bananas. Weird!

 

[BigBlueHen53]

Yes, we eat no bananas! Hmm. What do they know that we don't, I wonder?