At home: Dead Eggs

Eggs are the strangest things.

If you have warmed and hatched your own eggs in an incubator to a new little life, you will know what I mean. Its hard to look at the eating egg in the same way.

You see our cockerel runs with our hens all the time. This means that effectively every laid egg is ready and primed for life. I say this, because there are some schools of thought that reckon that the fertilised egg is already cell dividing inside the chicken before the egg is laid. If that were so, and I think it is so... then you would be able to see a cluster of small cells with the naked eye when you crack your egg into your frying pan. Well, we usually can. I would say that most people who collect their eggs from free range natural places perhaps have a live egg.

Of course... you must and should always collect the eggs quickly and place them in the fridge. Thus stopping / slowing the cell progress, unless you want hatching eggs. After only a week, in a warm incubator ...or the under the eiderdown of fluffy feathers of your broody hen you have a blood vessels forcing their way around the egg. A mapping out of life.

The odd thing is, and I think perhaps natural selection maybe... that a broody hen will sometimes at the this stage cast out some eggs. She effectively kills some of her chicks. I dont know why that is. I am guessing it must be something to do with how many chicks she is choosing to raise. I know this because I had a broody once that hatched all her eggs but two. The last two had pipped their shells. The other chicks, already hatched twenty four hours earlier needed feeding. Choosing between the life of her hatched chicks and the lives of her pipping chicks chose to cast them out of the nest. They dies in their shells with their beaks poking out.

You might wonder whether the incubator is a safer option. Yes it is, I think. Nature can even play a part here though. A power cut, over night caused these eggs to cold. All died except for one chick. Nature is hard to us conscious thinking humans, but perhaps it makes sense to a chicken somehow.....x