We have some broody chickens in our hen house. The Buff Orpingtons in particular think they are ready to be mothers, but they invariably let others have turns in their chosen nesting box, and the result is 18-24 eggs under one hen in the course of 2 days, far more than she can hope to hatch out.
We’ve wasted a lot of eggs this way, mostly when the girls decide without telling me to leave the eggs under one hen. Usually I catch on within a day or two, when our egg production drops to half of normal because half of the hens are laying in the one box where the eggs aren’t being gathered.
This morning I found 16 eggs under a cranky buff. I brought them in and not knowing just how old they were, I decided to make custard right away. I would crack them one by one into a coffee mug and any eggs that showed signs of germination would go right to the dogs.
I cracked 9 warm eggs, one by one. Six were fit for custard and 3 with small spots of blood went to the dogs.
The next egg held a lot of blood and a tiny chick embryo. Disgusting, but fascinating. We fished it out with a fork and examined it. There were the beginnings of tiny eyes, and what we thought looked like a spinal cord. We all looked, then tossed it in the dog dish.
A few more eggs went into the custard bowl, and then it happened.
I cracked open an egg and as the yolk slid into the mug I found another embryo nestled in the bottom of the shell – but this one was slightly more developed. There was one other difference: this one was quite obviously alive. This one had a beating heart.
I watched for a moment, trapped somewhere between fascination and horror, then called the girls over to see. The heart kept beating. The little curled-up baby chick was smaller than a dime, with dark eyes the size of matchheads and tiny buds where his legs and wings would be, but his heart beat clear and strong. We watched the minutes tick by. It kept beating, and beating, and beating. He lay in a puddle of egg white in half of his egg shell, curling occasionally, and his tiny heart beat on. The Boy asked me why we couldn’t just give him back to his mom. Eventually, the children moved on to other activities. After 2 hours, the tiny heart was still beating, and finally somebody ended it.
We eat eggs every day, and we eat meat. We all know and understand that animals die for us, but this was different somehow. We wanted to eat the egg before the chick began growing or let it hatch and grow into a chicken. It hurt and horrified us to waste the life and death of one of God’s creatures, even such a tiny one. The girls blamed each other for not gathering the eggs soon enough, and some rushed to put the broody hen into a separate cage with her own nesting box where she could work on hatching out the remaining eggs.
Ewww…we don’t have chickens ourselves, but we always collected from my Grandma’s hens when I was little. (although the occasional rat in the hen house always made this a kind of scary chore)
I understand the whole cycle of life, we’re proud to be meat eaters, etc, etc. But still, ewww — I think it’d be awhile before I’d be able to eat eggs again. : )
BTW, thanks for your advice on Swagbucks!
We’ve had similar sadness here today regarding chickens. We are incubating 18 chickens eggs, and I think the baby in the lone white egg is dead. My poor sensitive girlie cried. I felt bad for her.
When I was little I went to my grandma’s farm in san marcos. I used to love looking at all the chickens and emu’s that she had. One day I wanted to play with an egg the chicken had hatched (being a city girl I didn’t know what I was doing). I cracked it on the ground (to see if it would fry… it was hot!). To my horror it was a baby chick.. still growing. More developed than the one in the picture. I haven’t really gotten over it yet. I cried so much that day
Interesting…it’ll be a long while before the girls let that happen again…
That is so sad!
We had the same problem. One really broody hen. We thought we were getting all the eggs she tried to sit on every day, but one day last week the kids brought one in that was peeping! We quickly returned it and all the others to the mama, and a day later we had a baby chick! She must have had that one buried deep in the nesting box. Unfortunately we missed another one. Just yesterday my hubby was making breakfast and found one that looked to be fully developed. We must have missed it too, but it was in the refrigerator for a few days. I feel awful! So glad we got rid of our rooster (the meanie) so we won’t have to deal with this again. Talk about guilt!
Sad, for sure. But I just think of what a wonderful learning experience! And, of course, all the implications for being pro-HUMAN-life… if we all feel bad for cutting short the life of a baby chick, even more so a small human fetus/baby.
awww… that’s so sad! We hatched some turkey eggs last year and our inexperience left us having to kill a couple that weren’t turned properly so their organs stuck on the outside to the shell and would never have survived once hatched. And it is sad, but our children are quickly learning that it’s part of the game when you’re raising your own food. (We had to put down a piglet last year that had intestinal issues and couldn’t pass anything too.)
You know, we have nine Buffs and never have had a single one go broody! I was starting to think they were just lousy hens!
That’s a facinating story. As a City Girl getting farm eggs this is a big fear of mine, and it kind of grosses hubby out too. Luckily we have never gotten more than some blood spots and 1 bad egg. My grandma always cracks her eggs into a little dish “just in case”.
Homeschooling is definately a lifestyle.
I hope to get chickens soon but for the first couple of years I am planning on going roosterless so this type of thing is avoided. I know it is part of life but I don’t have a strong stomach. Could you have “candled” the eggs to see if there was a lot of developement?
Wow. There’s my “learn one new thing each day” tid bit. City girl here – I didn’t know you could/people did eat eggs that have been fertilized.
Heather,
Yes, many or most farm eggs are fertilized. As long as you catch them quickly (i.e. gather eggs twice/day) there’s no noticeable difference.
Wow. Interesting. We’re just starting our chicken farm (mini-farm). We have 5 Rhode Island Reds and I’ve ordered the same amount of Black Australorps, Buff Orpingtons, and Auracanas. They are all 4 hens and 1 rooster. Also, my 10 year old daughter has a pair of Sumatras to show in the fair this year. Oh, I should have said our fowl farm. lol My husband also wanted ducks and geese, so we have a pair of geese and 4 ducks (1 male, 3 females).
Yuk! We get those too!
Eww eww eww! That is so sad and gross!
That’s why we don’t have roosters!
I didn’t know you had a rooster, wow. I don’t know anyone locally who has a rooster with their chickens and have never come across a fertilized egg.
And I don’t think it’s gross, only sad. When I miscarried for the first time, our lost baby looked almost exactly like that little chicken embryo, only no heartbeat, which we (fortunately) knew beforehand
We keep roosters around to help protect the hens from predators – and also because we’d like to let the hens hatch some chicks occasionally. We had 2 roosters, but lately 2 more have been hanging about. They all seem to get along well so we don’t mind the extra protection although I do wonder if they’ll eat enough to impact the cost of our eggs.
Our girls love to play baseball with undeveloped eggs out of the incubator,These are invariably rotten.And the stink is terrible.However this dear hobby of theirs is nowadays only allowed next to the dungheap lol.
Another thing that has made us truly respect our food is home butchering..you really won’t waste your food after that.
Wow.. we have chickens (and roosters), but so far we haven’t gotten *that far* with any eggs. Sometimes we’ll find a nest (in summer) hidden in teh brush where hens have been laying, and we don’t know how long they’ve been there. I use the ‘float test’ to see if they’re very old or not, and go from there. Though I always crack eggs individually into a little dish before adding to a recipe or anything.
The other day I witnessed the precious human version of the same thing. Amazing, and sad, breathtaking and heartbreaking.
I have to say… I’d probably lose my egg appetite for days if that happened to me!
There’s a method you can “check” eggs with.. I’m not sure if it would work for an embryo that young or not. However, when my mom was unsure about eggs she would set the egg on a counter, spin it like a top, and then tap her finger on the top. If it stopped spinning, it was assumed there could be a chick inside. If it kept spinning, the egg was safe to break open.
wow. An animal’s innate will to LIVE is so excruciating when their is no hope for their survival. We hatch a few eggs every year, and there is always one chick that is not healthy enough to really get out of its shell. And we wait for it to die. And wait. And wait. It is truly a terrible experience. I used to think my dad was so mean for “putting animals out of their misery” but now I know it is mercy. And it is not easy. Either way, letting nature “take its course” or “putting them out of their misery”- both are hard. Death is hard.
On another note- it is very interesting from a science perspective that it kept beating so long. Wow.
XOXO
Joce
Oh, and you can use a very bright flash light in a dark room to see even the smallest of embryo development- without cracking the egg. Wrap a large hand (or two smaller hands) around the egg, shine the light from under the egg (the bottom of your hands), and view from the top (the circle made by your thumb and pointer finger).
XOXO
joce
Joining in the ranks of been there done that. We have let our broody hen sit on a few eggs and I typically mark them in some way so the kids/I know not to collect them…one I did not see or the mark just wasn’t there. I was early in my pregnancy. The butter was already melting in the pan and I cracked the egg right into the butter…UGH. That is a site I will not soon forget. Took me a LONG time to have another egg.
Oh, that is just too sad! My heart broke for that chick…so so so sad!
Thanks for sharing this story. It IS so sad! But I am betting that your girls will be even more pro-life than what they already are. There is something so profound about seeing the reality of what life is really like at such an early stage of development, even if it is just a chicken. Everyone who is “pro-choice” ought to be made to see such a thing….maybe it would horrify them enough that they could make the connection to what abortion is really about.
I fear I would never make it as a farm girl.
Does this mean when I see a spot of blood in my grocery store eggs I should feed them to the garbage?
OK now I have no desire to eat any eggs for awhile
My sister cracked an egg (from the supermarket) that had a chicken embryo inside as a pre-teen. She was a mom before she would break another egg.
Tracey,
I have checked on this question before, and from what I understand a speck of blood in grocery store eggs does not make the egg inedible. I usually scoop out the little speck of blood, as I’m a little squeemish, but, it’s not unhealthy as far as I understand.
Grocery store eggs are not fertile, so dont worry if they have a speck of blood in them.
Here’s something you can do to avoid this happening in the future.
When you decide to let a broody hen hatch out some chicks, take a Sharpie and write the date on the fat end of the egg. Ex: 4-15. And count how many you gave her.
Then every single day, check under the hen to see if any other hens have been adding to her clutch of eggs. If there are extra eggs, remove them daily. They will be fine to eat.
This happened to us before and it’s so sad, so we started writing on the eggs to prevent this. Also, it lets you know when the chicks will be due so that you can be prepared for them.
Yes, we write on our eggs as well. There is just no way for us to seperate the broody hen from the rest so this method works wonderfully.
Oh, my aching heart. I can’t stop thinking about what happens to little people whose mommies don’t want them. I can imagine how hard it was to watch that little chickie.
When one of my hens goes broody and I want her to hatch some eggs I usually allow 8-10 eggs under her so none are left out in the cold. Then I mark the eggs with a circle going all the way around the center of the egg horizontally that way I can see at a glance which ones I want to leave in the nest each day when I gather eggs. I usually use a colored pencil but not a permanent marker because the egg shells are porous.
My dad writes on his eggs too so he knows which ones to leave under the hen. He leaves wooden eggs painted white in the nests too so that he knows when the hens are getting broody before having to decide whether to leave them some real ones or not and how many. This is helpful if the hen that is broody is one with a track record of not being good with eggs and letting them die- then he knows to just leave her with the wooden ones and save the hatching for a better hen. We thankfully never found an obvious embrio but we learned to crack them in a little bowl in case of a blood speck. The blood specks are fine to eat but I never could. I always gave those eggs to the dogs. I’ve heard that fertilized eggs are healthier to eat than unfertilized eggs. I don’t know why.