Short version of this post: Do broody hens sometimes eat an egg and leave no trace of the egg?
Long version:
I've been keeping laying hens for about 5 years now. Recently a year-old hen became broody, so I am taking my first foray into having her incubate and hatch some eggs for us.
I put 8 fertilized eggs under her on April 15. I was careful to mark the eggs before putting them under her. I have only seen her off of them one time, on about day 1 or 2. Since she had taken up residence in the primary nest box, I set up a second nest box for the other 5 hens. We have been checking the eggs under her each day, and have only found two unmarked eggs, again early on. In the past week, there have been no eggs laid in her box, and each time we found the original 8 marked eggs.
Today my wife checked and there were only 7 marked eggs. No shell, no eggy mess, no sign of a broken egg. We fished all around in the nest box but found nothing. I carefully rooted through all of the wheat straw bedding in the rest of the coop/run and found two unmarked eggs laid in ad hoc nests on the floor, but no marked egg.
The only suspect thing is that my wife also found the waterer knocked over. It's a good, wide-based 3 gallon job, so there must have been some commotion in the coop to knock it over. Maybe in some of that commotion one of the broody's eggs got cracked and she ate it?
The nest box she is in is about 18" off the floor of the coop/run and has a good lip on it, so it would have been hard for any of the hens to roll an egg out.
The combo coop/run has been reliably predator and vermin proof since i built it >5 years ago. We have had a couple of incidents of egg-eating by one of the hens, but have been able to nip it in the bud each time - and there was always shell left behind to tip us off to the incident.
Long version:
I've been keeping laying hens for about 5 years now. Recently a year-old hen became broody, so I am taking my first foray into having her incubate and hatch some eggs for us.
I put 8 fertilized eggs under her on April 15. I was careful to mark the eggs before putting them under her. I have only seen her off of them one time, on about day 1 or 2. Since she had taken up residence in the primary nest box, I set up a second nest box for the other 5 hens. We have been checking the eggs under her each day, and have only found two unmarked eggs, again early on. In the past week, there have been no eggs laid in her box, and each time we found the original 8 marked eggs.
Today my wife checked and there were only 7 marked eggs. No shell, no eggy mess, no sign of a broken egg. We fished all around in the nest box but found nothing. I carefully rooted through all of the wheat straw bedding in the rest of the coop/run and found two unmarked eggs laid in ad hoc nests on the floor, but no marked egg.
The only suspect thing is that my wife also found the waterer knocked over. It's a good, wide-based 3 gallon job, so there must have been some commotion in the coop to knock it over. Maybe in some of that commotion one of the broody's eggs got cracked and she ate it?
The nest box she is in is about 18" off the floor of the coop/run and has a good lip on it, so it would have been hard for any of the hens to roll an egg out.
The combo coop/run has been reliably predator and vermin proof since i built it >5 years ago. We have had a couple of incidents of egg-eating by one of the hens, but have been able to nip it in the bud each time - and there was always shell left behind to tip us off to the incident.
