What Can Cause Change in Egg Coloring?

[Barry Natchitoches]

Every now and then, I find my hens eggs either are more pastel than normal, or in one case -- was white as a snowflake.


It was a brown egg layer that laid that white egg. And I have occasionally found more pastel than normal eggs among both my brown and blue egg layers. This doesn't happen very often, but it happens occasionally.


I didn't think too much about it until tonight when talking with a dairy farmer friend of mine who raises high quality brown egg layers and sells their eggs commercially. I bought two of her 17 week old production reds a few weeks ago, and have now gotten two brown pullet eggs from them.


She has gotten her first five pullet eggs from the 123 birds she still has at her farm, but all 5 of her pullet eggs are WHITE!


I just picked two of the batch she had just gotten in from a breeder in Pennsylvania the day after they arrived at her home. Their selection was totally random, literally determined by which two birds we could catach first.


But my two pullet eggs are brown, and her five pullet eggs are white. From the same batch of chickens!


What might be going on here?

 

[Barry Natchitoches]

BTW -- I don't know if this has anything to do with the difference, but she runs a dairy farm so she has plenty of extra raw milk to feed her chickens.


She is kind enough to share her extra milk with my chickens, but I don't like to take too much of the wonderful stuff since she shares it with me for free. As a result, my chickens don't drink anywhere near as much milk as hers do.


The thing is, she has about 150 of the same variety of production red, brown laying hens she bought from the same breeder last year, and they all lay dark brown eggs -- and they all drink plenty of milk. Their eggs have never been lighter because of the milk.


The only reason I even bring up this milk issue is that I never gave my birds milk until I discovered this lady back last summer, and she shared her extra milk with my chickens for the first time.


And it was right after I gave my chickens milk for about a week or so -- for the first time in their lives -- that I got that white egg, and those other eggs that were very pastel in color.


So I backed off the milk, and my normal hens egg color returned.


Then I went back to feeding them milk -- but not quite as much -- and the egg color stayed normal dark brown.



That is why I bring up the issue of drinking milk when asking you folks if you have any idea why my friend might be getting white eggs from brown egg layers.

 

[Kathleen1115]

I had this happen once, and in addition to being white instead of brown, the shell was very thick and a little uneven. I put it up to the additional calcium we'd started giving them -- oyster shell and daily yogurt -- and backed off a little with the yogurt. Also, one of our BOs gave us three or four rubber eggs and as far as I can tell, she's also the one who gave us the white egg, so I think she's still getting into her groove since she's only been laying for a few weeks. I'd attribute it to extra calcium and just general variation that we aren't used to in store-bought eggs.