Snow’s even weirder egg

Two days after Snow’s weird egg she once again had the awful posture that meant she was struggling again with an egg coming.

Soon after this Snow went in the nest box. All the laying girls had by this time laid their eggs. Next time I checked Snow was back out in the run. In the nest box was a huge egg. When I picked it up it was soft but I could feel a hard shelled egg inside it.

Red lays the biggest egg of all our girls and Snow’s was even bigger.

The outer egg again had no proper yolk just a strange bit of something and a lot of white. Inside the inner egg was a normal egg.

I immediately changed the water back to plain water. It’s obviously not a lack of calcium problem but just not enough calcium to make two egg shells at once.

If the outer shell had been hard Snow would have been in real trouble. It would probably either have got stuck or caused a prolapse. It’s flexibility was probably what enabled her to pass it.

I have seen on you tube people cracking an egg with another egg inside so I set about researching this. It is called counter-peristalsis contraction. A formed egg travels backward and becomes embedded inside a second egg in development.

It is supposed to be rare – one in one hundred thousand. Why does it have to happen to us!

I watched videos of eggs being cracked. They were all from standard sized birds and were really large. Most were a hard shelled egg inside another hard shelled egg. One was a soft shelled egg inside a hard shelled egg. I didn’t find any that were a hard shelled egg inside a soft shelled egg. The other difference was that all of them had a yolk in both eggs.

This worries me as I wonder where the yolk has gone. There was no information on why this happens or how to stop it happening. Snow also has a slightly mucky bottom which is never a good sign.

Snow usually lays every other day and she has still been laying every other day. This means she has been producing an extra egg on the days in between and then laying both on the second day. This would explain why she had sat in the nest box on the in between days but not laid.

This is extremely worrying. If she continues to do this I think we could lose her. I can’t understand why this is happening when she was laying normally last year and this year until now and I have no idea what can be done to help her.

This happened yesterday and today Snow sat in the nest box again. I was hoping she would get a single egg laid but once more she came out of the nest box without laying.

That means we will have to wait until tomorrow to see what happens next. At the moment she looks okay though. We can only keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.