Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon...! Arrival of the First Eggs

My little helper Nick and I headed out to shut the chickens in their coop for the night. We opened the door to count them, and I noticed a little egg shaped item on the coop floor. I could barely believe my eyes, but I reached down to touch it, and while the shell was soft, it was indeed an egg! The girls turned 22 weeks old this week, and they are entering womanhood!

Here you can see the various sized combs they are developing, which is a sign of maturation.

Dot's comb seemed to grow overnight.
This photo was taken this weekend, and the comb is even bigger today.

Nick helped me look in the nesting boxes, and there sat another beautiful little egg. Nick was very excited, but I told him we needed to go get Joe, and away we ran back into the house to get Joe.

We grabbed flashlights and headed back outside as quickly as we could. I was so nervous they would step on an egg or that the eggs would be terribly fragile and break, but I was pleasantly surprised to find how well they stood up to the boys handling them. The soft-shelled one even stood up to Nick throwing it on our kitchen floor when we got inside because Joe told him it was "bouncy" and he wanted to see how it bounced. It didn't bounce, but it did stay intact!

We ended up finding three eggs! One truly hard-shelled blue-green beauty, one soft-shelled oddity, and one membrane-covered mutation. I have read that when chickens aren't getting enough calcium, their shells can be soft or non-existent. Doing further reading tonight, I also found out that first eggs can be like that too. Soft-shell, no shell, smaller and sometimes oddly shaped are all normal in the first 2-3 weeks of laying. I have more research to do.

Left to right: Soft shell, no shell, hard shell. This is before I washed them off.

We don't know which of the 9 layed these eggs, and we don't know if it was 3, or 2 or even just 1 of the girls that produced these. There's probably not a good way to know with the configuration we have for their coop. I feel confident, however, that we will be seeing MANY more eggs soon!

Sadly, Jason missed the excitement as he was in class this evening, but as soon as he got home, the boys couldn't give him all the details fast enough.


So begins our sustainable egg supply, from happy, healthy chickens, that we can feel confident are untainted by weird hormone treatments or poor living conditions. I can't wait to fry up one of these eggs. Maybe tomorrow morning, with a side of bacon!