Egg!

For the last two days, we noticed one of the orange chickens strutting around and squawking loudly around the chicken shed, while testing out different places to sit. Something important was going to happen, and today it finally did. Giving the chickens their evening feed, Lisa spotted something in the shelf: our first egg. We took our prize and gently carried it home.

So, after a week of waiting, we got an egg.  Why now? We'd been told by our neighbours that the chickens for sure wouldn't lay until April, if it happened to be a warm spring. Maybe the chicken just wanted to prove her wrong. Or maybe it was because we'd just bought 18 eggs from the store and chickens have a fine sense of irony. 

Regardless, this is no ordinary egg. It is much larger than our other eggs. In fact, it barely fits in the old egg carton we put it in. 

It weighs in on our kitchen scale at somewhere around 65-70 g or around 2.5 ounces. This puts the egg firmly into Jumbo territory. It really is massive.  By contrast, the "large" eggs beside it weigh in at around 45 g. 

And the chicken that laid it is walking around, absolutely fine as far as we can see. Assuming the chicken weighs about 2.5 kg, the egg would represent around 2.5 to 3% of its body weight. I personally would not be hopping around the next day if it happened to me. So I have new respect for the chicken.