Hen Chronicles: Don't touch that egg! Please!

As soon as I opened the coop door at dawn this morning, I knew something was amiss.

I’ve probably mentioned before in this space that when I release “the girls” from their coop every morning, they make a mad dash down the ramp and into the pen, even smooshing themselves together as all three of them struggle to get through the narrow opening at the same time.

Today was different. When I opened the door, no one raced out. No one even moved. Instead, the right side of one of our Rhode Island Reds blocked the opening. The hen was upright, but she wasn’t moving, at least not from what I could see. The other two hens were not visible, and there was no telltale clucking from any of them, as there normally is first thing in the morning.

I quickly realized what was going on. The hens were silent and stationary because they had found something to eat in the coop. And the only thing they could have found to eat in the coop was a broken egg.

It’s been years since any of our hens deliberately broke a freshly laid egg to eat it, and quite a while since any of them laid a soft-shelled egg that broke on its own. This time around, the latter seemed to be the case. After I shooed the girls out into the pen so I could clean the coop, I saw that the egg shell, or what was left of it, was rubbery.

Chickens need calcium to form firm shells, and although they normally get enough of it from their feed, sometimes they develop a calcium deficiency. One solution is to give them crushed oyster shells, which they will eat as needed. Sure enough, as soon as I placed a small bowl of oyster shells in the coop this morning — something I had not done for quite some time — one of the Rhode Island Reds began pecking at it.

With any luck, that will solve the soft-shell problem. But now another problem looms. Saturday’s adventure probably reminded the girls that they love the taste of eggs, as all chickens do. So will they start breaking them deliberately, to get at the goodies within?

For the longest time, I kept two wooden eggs in the nest box, where the hens lay their eggs. The theory behind this is that if a hungry pen pecks a wooden egg, thinking it’s the real deal, the feel of beak hitting wood will be unpleasant enough to persuade her to leave all eggs — real or wooden — untouched in the future.

But my old wooden eggs disappeared from the coop years ago. The hens probably rolled them out into the pen and inadvertently buried them in the dirt while scratching for bugs. So I headed out to a craft store this morning and bought two new ones. Here’s hoping that dissuades Snow, Nellie and Hope from fixing their own breakfast tomorrow.