Our tireless Plymouth Rock, Snow, continues to amaze. Even though she remains in isolation, recovering from a self-inflicted wound that cut part of her comb from her head, she continues laying at her usual rate of several eggs per week. That would be good under normal circumstances because Snow isn’t, as they say, a spring chicken anymore, but she's on the DL to boot. Our two Rhode Island Reds lay more frequently, but they’re younger, they're uninjured and their eggs are smaller.
Yesterday, though, Snow outdid herself. Despite her age (she's at least three years old) and her injury, which initially caused heavy bleeding from a head wound, our own feathered Wonder Woman laid an egg that may have been the biggest of her “career.”
Snow spent most of Thursday morning lying in the cat carrier that serves as a substitute nest box while she recuperates in our backup chicken pen. So I knew she was trying to lay, which often is quite a production for her because her eggs are consistently large. When I went out to check on her after lunch, however, she was running around in the pen, begging for snacks and acting as if she was proud, relieved or some combination of the two.
Sure enough, there was an egg nestled in the pine shavings that provide bedding in “her” cat carrier. But this wasn’t any old egg. It was a monster. Our two Rhode Island Reds, Nellie and Hope, typically lay eggs that are 2 1/4 inches long. Snow’s latest measured about 2 3/4 inches, making it a truly jumbo-sized egg that was unusually heavy as well. It was so big that I almost couldn't close the carton containing it.
No wonder the poor girl was strutting her stuff by the time I got out there yesterday afternoon to see how she was doing. As chickens go, she's a force of nature.
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| Snow's monster egg, front and center |
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