Two major disappointments though....
1. The egg was very light colored.
2. It was crushed and eaten!
Boooo! :(
It was as I feared. Before we got the chickens, we were in the habit of throwing eggshells into our open compost pile. The thought never crossed my mind until I saw a chicken munching on an eggshell one day. ARG!!! I cleaned out all the shells I could find and hoped that I didn't have an egg-eater on my hands.
Alas, it was worse that I thought! I decided to find out who was eating eggs, so I took a store egg out and put it on the ground. About 6 of my hens came running and dove at it! So I'm thinking, what can I do but slate my whole flock to the stew pot? I did a bit of research online and found out that chickens hate mustard. So I grabbed an eggshell from the trash and coated the inside with mustard. I took it out to the chickens and put it cracked side down on the ground. Again 4 or 5 hens dove for it. This time I let them have it. Each hen in turn pecked the egg and got a mouthful of mustard! They really do hate it! They shook their heads and rubbed their beaks on the ground. Usually one bite and they made no further attempt to eat the egg. Soon none of the chickens would even look at the egg. So I moved the egg to a different spot. Again the girls went for it, though not quite as enthusiastically. Another taste sent them to rubbing their beaks. I moved it around several times until no one wanted any more to do with the egg.
I also added three ceramic eggs to the nest box, expecting that this morning they would try to eat them and find it very difficult. I was hopeful that by the time somebody laid an egg, they would have given up trying to eat the ceramic ones and the real egg will be intact when I went to look.
So today I kept the chickens cooped up so I would be sure to have any eggs that were laid today. I checked around 5 this morning (I was up anyway for a few minutes ;) ) and no eggs. When I fed them around 8, nothing. Lunch?.... nope. I went to give them dinner and YES! An egg! And it was intact! Fantastic! The egg was small, light colored, and speckled.It looks more like a Welsummer egg than a Marans egg. But it's an egg! So we are happy! :)
