Witch Egg

Our Phoenix hen, Sue, laid a witch egg.

Chris found it by the food bowl.  From reading up, they’re called “Witch eggs,” “Dwarf eggs,” “runt eggs,” and “wind eggs.”  Some people call them “fart eggs.”  We think that it may have been her first egg back on the cycle – she had stopped laying for a while, when she sat and went broody, and hadn’t laid since.  For those of you who asked after the eggs I put under Sue – sadly, they did not hatch.  She and I both made rookie mistakes – she failed to get up off the eggs to do her business one afternoon, and I failed to change her diet to a higher-carbohydrate, lower-protein one to prevent loose stools.  An entire clutch of eggs evenly coated in chicken diarrhea is NOT a pretty thing to come home to.  I cleaned them according to instructions I found on the internet, rinsing gently in tepid water, and cleaned her nest, and changed her diet – but the damage had been done, and the eggs all eventually succumbed to bacteria.

The tiny egg next to one of Sue’s normal eggs. Sue has very long, slender eggs; sometimes both ends are equally pointed, which I think is cool.   Sue is an odd bird – her eyes are black from side to side, and she has spurs like a rooster.

Often, these tiny eggs won’t have any yolk.  The shell is considerably thicker than the normal egg.  This one has a tiny proto-yolk.

Just to see what it would do, I fried both of them, sunny-side-up. Unfortunately, the tiny yolk was surrounded by an area of thickened white, so it didn’t make a cute tiny bubble of yellow.  It tasted just fine, though.