No eggs for a month, now rubber eggs or "deflated" eggs?

[Yoder Farm]

We allowed our broody hen to hatch and raise a baby chick, it's doing great and growing fast! She is a good mother and very protective.

For about a month, while the chick was very small... none of our hens were laying. We don't know if momma was chasing them out of the box, or if the weather had something to do with it.. it was very hot here (brutal) for weeks.

Now baby (which we have named Cojiro) and mama are out and about almost daily and the hens went up for the first time in a while to lay. But the eggs were abnormal.

One egg was a leathery, wrinkled shell... like an egg "raisin", just a rubbery shell with no contents. The other egg was enormous, sandy, and rubbery. It had a sandlike texture that comes off on your hand when you handle the egg.

Is it normal for chickens to stop laying when a new baby is born, or when the weather is extremely hot?

Also is it normal to get these strange eggs when they start laying again?

This is all so new to me. The hens are pastured so they eat bugs, grass, etc but also we give them a little layer feed and of course they help themselves to whatever scraps they find in the compost (especially watermelon, they love watermelon rind).

 

[Judy]

Yes, they normally stop laying when they are sitting on eggs and until a week or so after they are through raising the chicks.

Here is a good resource for egg defects. (Click on any topic on the left.) And here's hoping these were just a glitch and she goes back to laying normal eggs.

http://www.thepoultrysite.com/publications/1/egg-quality-handbook/11/egg-defects

 

[Yoder Farm]

The strange thing is, when the egg hatched, all four hens just stopped laying. I am hoping that the rubbery eggs was just from their system "starting up" again. Could that be?