Too many eggs in oviduct?

[brandywine]

Posted this over in behavior and egglaying to be greeted by crickets chirping.

Anyone know?
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I kept three Freedom Ranger hens from last year's meat flock. (An experiment I will not repeat.) One died with a grossly enlarged heart this spring, I sent one to the processor with my Cornish this week, and one -- the famous Dale "Supersize" McNugget -- died suddenly last week.

On necropsy (aka dressing out the bird for the dogs' dinner and looking closely at the innards), I found EIGHT intact egg yolks (and probably a total of nine, since there seemed to be one broken one) inside.

Is that a normal number of eggs to be queued up? I can't find any information on how many yolks would typically be in the oviduct. I thought I had once read that three would be typical, but can't remember where.

And I am not sure they were in the oviduct -- they seemed to be loose in the body cavity, but of course it's likely I ruptured the oviduct while dressing her out.

Perhaps she was an internal layer?

Anyone have any insight on this?

 

[peaceful]

Once a visiting puppy killed one of our hens and so we butchered her and, in cutting into the abdomen, found all the egg yolks lined up for future egg production, getting smaller and smaller until they were just tiny. Now these were just egg yolks. As the hen gets closer to lay then the next yolk in line is covered with white and with the shell, and then laid. I thought it was fascinating. Anyway we had more than nine in there, but again in decreasing size.
A bit hard to tell from your description, but it sounds normal to me unless you saw more than one egg with a shell in there or eggs with broken shells..

 

[Oven Ready]

As Peaceful says, I would say that's pretty normal. Lots of eggs in progressively smaller sizes with no shell until you get a cluster of what looks like yellow frog spawn.

They are a popular dish here as are chicks dead in the shell at hatching. Not much gets wasted round these parts.

 

[MotherJean]

You may just be seeing the ovary (with eggs in various stages of development) which lies in the body cavity in proximity to the oviduct. There is a photo on page 3 of the pdf file at this link that should help you decide what you're looking at: http://www.ca.uky.edu/smallflocks/Factsheets/Anatomy_and_Physiology/Anatomy_Female_reproductive.pdf

 

[brandywine]

Thanks, this is what I was looking for.

I guess the late Dale was normal, at least as far as her egg equipment was concerned.

I looked all over the web for the kind of nitty-gritty information in the extension publication that MotherJean posted.

I wasn't able to get a great look inside the body cavity when I dressed her out. She chose the middle of a 12-hour power outage to die. I didn't have decent light in the kitchen, nor much water.

 

[MotherJean]

Glad it helped. A tip that might help with your internet searching...you'll often get better results if you use the Latin medical terminology as your search term. In this case, "ova" or "ovum" instead of "egg."

BTW, I also have a very good link to some actual necropsy videos made by the Vet College at Cornell if you're interested. They're very detailed on how to examine internal organs and offer some examples of abnormalities to look for. Feel free to PM me if you'd like that link.