Egg-stremely big egg causes double egg-citement

The sky may not be falling at the Heinrich hen house, but Henny Penny sure has caused egg-citement.

Not once, but twice, this Araucana hen has laid a five-inch-long double egg - one egg inside another. Her caretakers, Dee and Rick Heinrich, remain flabbergasted and on the lookout for more.

“We keep wondering,” Dee says. “Every day I go out there, I wonder.”

For Rick, Oct. 4 was just any old early morning egg hunt in the house where the rural Marion couple keeps 15 hens. Then - no egg-saggeration - he found an egg five inches long.

“You're not going to believe what I've got,” he said, showing the rare find to Dee.

“We both oohed and aahed and felt sorry for the chicken that laid it,” Dee says.

Figuring the egg had multiple yolks - she needed three eggs to bake some bread - Dee cracked it open.

“Lo and behold,” she says, “there was another wholly formed egg inside.”

Strange, they thought. But not egg-sactly egg-shattering news.

The Heinrichs - she raises sheep and he's an engineer at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids - have kept laying hens for ten years.

“We took care of a friend's chickens while they were away for Christmas or something,” says Dee, 59. “It was fun. It just seemed like it was a perpetual Easter egg hunt. And the eggs tasted wonderful.”

The Heinrichs took it to the next level with mail-ordered Araucana hens that lay bluish, greenish, brown, pinkish-brown, tan and grayish eggs.

And their children, Justin and Ashleigh, now away from home, loved gathering eggs.

On Oct. 6, just two days later, Rick's hunt produced another egg-sclamation: “I think Henny Penny has done it again.”

This time, Dee's mother, Jerry Mach, 79, hard-boiled the egg for 25 minutes, cut it open and preserved it in her refrigerator. She also showed to friends at Meth-Wick, her retirement home.

“Everyone was quit astonished,” she says. “Nobody had heard of it.”

Yes, it seems this is egg-stremely rare.

One Internet source, www.poultryhelp.com/oddeggs.html, egg-splains that a double-shelled egg appears when “an egg that is nearly ready to be laid reverses direction and gets a new layer of albumin covered by a second shell.”

“And poor Henny Penny,” Dee says, “She did it twice.”

But Henny Penny is no egg-otist. She simply continues to lay eggs and will look at you as if to say, “What? Do you think the sky is falling?”