It’s always a treat to find a pullet’s first egg. A new group of Silverudd’s Blue pullets have begun laying, and they’ve mostly figured out that eggs belong in the nest box. This morning, though, there was another surprise: a fairy pullet egg!
I had to look twice because I wasn’t entirely sure what I was seeing when I first spotted it. It’s really tiny, much like a wild songbird’s egg. The tractor is secure, though, so no birds can get in there. Clearly, it did belong to one of the girls.
You may already know that a pullet (young hen) lays an egg that’s smaller than her mature eggs will be. I’d say that they typically start out at around 2/3 the size of a standard egg. To my chagrin, the fairy egg was laid in the grass; sometimes it takes a bit for young hens to lay consistently in the nest box, so I put some golf balls in there to encourage them.
For comparison, I placed the fairy pullet egg next to a standard Silverudd’s Blue egg (laid by a mature hen) and a goose egg. Quite a difference, right?
In the next few weeks, the pullet eggs will gradually become larger until they’re the same size as those laid by our mature hens. I’m guessing that the unusually diminutive size of the fairy egg means that there’s no yolk, just white inside. I’ll update this post after I open the egg so you can see what was inside. Stay tuned!
