Egg-citing Double Double Take

I couldn't help myself with the egg puns as I wrote my Ramblin' column for today's Gazette newspaper. When Jerry Mach of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, called to  tell me about the 5-inch long egg inside an egg that her daughter, Dee Heinrich and husband, Rick, of rural Marion, Iowa, had discovered, I just had learn more. It's not that I didn't believe Jerry -- I knew it wasn't an egg-saggeration -- I just wanted to see it for myself.

As I walked into Dee's home, there it was, cut open on the kitchen table. Jerry had hard boiled the egg for 25 minutes and Rick had used a jigsaw to cut it open, careful not to damage the inside egg shell.

I was also surprised to see that both eggs had a natural greenish-bluish tint. That's when Dee explained that they have Araucana chickens that lay pastel colored eggs -- blue, green, tan, yellow, orange. It fits in with the fact that the Heinrichs took care of some friend's chickens about 10 years ago and thought gathering the eggs was like an Easter egg hunt every day.

But, on Oct. 4 and then on Oct. 6, Rick was blown away by the discovery of the larger than normal eggs he found in the hen house. Dee cracked open the first one, figuring it just had multiple yolks. When another egg was found inside, they thought that the second large egg must be the same.

This happens, they learned from searching the Internet, when one egg gets trapped inside the hen's reproductive mechanism and is  then encapsulated inside a new egg.

Since the Heinrichs have 15 laying hens, they weren't certain which one laid the large eggs. But, upon further investigation, it appears that Henny Penny (the hens all have names)  was the "mother." She continues to favor trying to hatch large eggs, in particular the wooden ones put into the nests to train the hens to lay eggs in the proper spots.

I was unable to find out the odds of this happening, especially that one chicken seemed to be doing the laying. But, in the nearly month since the eggs were discovered, no others like them have appeared.

So, needless to say, it was egg-citing while it happened.