I still remember the first time my chickens laid an egg. I went to the nest box to find not one but two large green eggs laid by my Olive Egger, Peggy. Though nothing will quite match the smiles of that first time, I still feel like every time I check the nest boxes, I’m embarking on a small sort of treasure hunt. I never know what I’ll find (or whether I’ll find anything at all).
The girls stop laying for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they’re molting or have gone broody. Sometimes I stop getting eggs in the nest box because one of them—usually Emmylou—is hiding them somewhere in the yard. I don’t give the chickens supplemental light in the winter so they go out of lay when the days get short then start up again one day in early spring.
To lay an egg is a big thing. We’re so used to getting them year-round that we forget how much it takes out of a hen to create and lay these things every day. I give the hens oyster shells for extra calcium. If their calcium levels get too low, they’ll leech it out of their bones to create the shells for each new egg. (Osteoporosis is common in ex-battery hens who are given just enough nutrition to keep laying eggs but not a whole lot more.) When they’re done laying, the girls burst into a loud cacophony of sound called the egg song. People have conjectured that it’s a celebration of laying an egg or a way to loudly lead predators away from a nest of eggs or maybe commiseration over the experience of laying an egg. When I first heard that, in terms of mass, a chicken laying an egg is roughly equivalent to a 160-pound woman birthing a 3.3-pound baby, I began to think maybe it was the latter.
As a woman, even a child-free one, it’s impossible to hear that and not have sympathy for the hen. (Let them make whatever sounds they want if it makes them feel better!) Yes, the birthing process is different from laying an egg and yes, one would hope a chicken’s physiology is better adapted to it but it’s not like the ancestor of the chicken laid 300+ eggs a year like modern production layers do. Annually, red jungle fowl hens lay closer to 10-15 eggs.
Unfortunately, there are many ways that laying an egg can go very very wrong for a hen. Hens can prolapse. Production layers often die from reproductive issues or ovarian cancer. If an egg accidentally breaks inside them or a yolk travels to the abdomen instead of the oviduct, it’s likely to cause a fatal infection. The egg can even get stuck inside a hen in the shell, a condition called “egg binding” which is also fatal if left for too long.
I’d read up on egg binding along with other chicken maladies when I was first preparing to get chickens. Often you can tell a hen is egg bound because she might walk strangely (if she walks at all) or sit with a fluffed-up appearance and not want to eat or drink. So when my small frizzle chicken Harriet began making a strange noise that sounded like a squeaker had gotten stuck in her throat last Monday, egg binding was not the first cause that came to mind.
She’d been making a strange noise when I went down to the coop to let the chickens out in the yard around noon. I didn’t think much of it at first. Chickens make a lot of strange noises particularly, I’ve found, when they are hoping I’ll let them out of the coop. But ten minutes later Harriet was still making the same sound and it had gotten louder. (Click here to listen.)
I put her into the crate we use for sick chickens. I wanted to get her calm and figure out what was going on. But as soon as she was inside, she began flinging herself from one side to the other like a ping pong ball, sticking her neck out of the cage, frantic to be free again. The squeaky toy sound she’d been making now sounded more like a bicycle horn. That’s when I wrapped her in a towel, put her on the floor in front of the passenger seat and began driving. The car was full of the sound, each breath clearly a struggle. At one point, Harriet wriggled out of her towel and flew up onto the dashboard, then onto my arm. She dug her toenails into me and wheezed and wheezed.
I told her “Just hang on a little longer, Harriet.” At least when she was breathing loudly she was still breathing.
I thought, “Not again.” I didn’t want to lose Harriet on any day but I’d only just stopped feeling overwhelmingly sad about Dolly, the long sick chicken who I finally made the decision to euthanize just over a week before.
We got to the vet and they rushed her out of the car and into an exam room. I sat in the parking lot with at least ten other cars full of people whose pets had arrived facing other emergencies. One couple came out of the clinic wearing masks and carrying an empty cat carrier. Even with her mask on, I could tell the woman was crying.
I waited.
After twenty or thirty minutes, I got a call. They didn’t see anything stuck in her airway “though she’s obviously in distress”. What they did notice when reaching into her frizzy feathers, was a large egg.
Harriet, who hatched in April, had only just laid her first egg a few weeks ago. This one—still stuck inside her—might be her fifth ever. The vet had given her some pain medication to calm her down and wanted to take an X-ray just to make sure that’s all that was going on.
(Harriet’s X-ray. At least if you pay for the photo they let you keep it!)
The X-ray looks alarming. How can an egg take up so much space inside their bodies? Yet when I compared it to the X-rays of other chickens with an egg ready to be laid, it wasn’t too abnormal. This is just what it means to be a hen. The vet worried that they’d have to take the egg out manually if Harriet couldn’t pass it on her own and gave her a second dose of pain medicine to make the procedure go more easily. Like most invasive procedures, it wasn’t risk free. I fretted from home with my phone beside me. To keep my mind off of it, I finished the last few episodes of a Netflix show Blown Away, a glass blowing competition. In one of the episodes I watched, a woman made sausages and a fried egg out of glass as a comment on gender. The egg, as we all know, is feminine. I thought about Harriet again.
I heard the smile in the vet’s voice before she even told me the words, “Good news.” By the time they came back to start the procedure, Harriet had laid the egg on her own. “I guess some pain killers were all she needed to help it along.”
I can’t remember when I first learned that chickens laid eggs and cows produced milk and pigs “became” bacon as though by magic. Adults always made it sound like these things occurred spontaneously—a bit like bees making their honey—and that humans were simply smart enough to take advantage of something animals were doing anyway. That’s not quite true. Cows don’t make milk without having calves. Chickens only lay so many eggs because we bred it into them until some breeds bodies don’t even take natural breaks in winter anymore. They just keep churning out eggs until their bodies can’t take it anymore.
It might have sounded like an overstatement when I referred to collecting the eggs from the nest box as a treasure hunt. But I do treasure them. I see the effort that goes into making every one of them. I see when the eggs are particularly large or small, when they’re saturated with color or perhaps covered in speckles. I worry when the eggshells are thinner than usual or when a regular layer takes an unscheduled break. Honestly, I’m in awe of the chickens that they can be so matter of fact about the whole process of returning to the nest day after day to lay another egg.
By the time I brought Harriet home around 9:30pm, it was dark. I paid the emergency vet bill which came out to $376.76. They put Harriet’s egg inside a plastic baggie and sent it home with her. It weighs 30 grams. It’s the most expensive egg I’ve ever heard of. I can’t help but wonder if it’s a fair price.
(Harriet looks skeptically at her egg.)
News from the Coop
I wrote the last edition of this newsletter, “The House Chicken”, a few days before I sent it out. As you were all reading it, I was giving Dolly her last good day. She got to eat as much of a fresh summer peach as she wanted. I hand-fed her mealworms. The next morning, it was clearly time to say goodbye. I’ve never had to make the decision to euthanize a pet before and even knowing that it was 100% the right thing to do, I’ve never had to make a harder call. When I handed her to the veterinary assistant, the woman asked me if I was ready to say goodbye. It felt like I’d been saying goodbye for months. I’ve spent so much time thinking about whether she was doing okay and how to help her that the absence of that care is another part of the loss, a too empty space in my brain. It’s gotten a little easier to miss her though I’m still reminded of her often.
The rest of the flock is still filling my days with lots of joy (and mischief). Peggy has become a shameless beggar. Olivia has started laying gorgeous chocolate brown eggs. Phryne, my polish with the fluffy hairdo, is still constantly surprised by everything because peripheral vision is not her strong suit. They make it easy to love them.
If you liked this email, please share it with a chicken or animal lover in your life! As always, email me at underthehenfluence@gmail.com with any tips or comments. See you in two weeks.
-Tove