Most people probably don’t spend much time marveling at how chickens come to be. You know a chicken comes out of an egg, but have you wondered how an egg forms inside a chicken? Have you seen double-yolked eggs, or maybe even triple-yolked eggs, and wondered how that happens?
When a hen first starts laying, usually around six months old (some breeds start earlier and some, later), she’s called a “pullet” and she lays a smallish egg called (you guessed it) a “pullet egg”. These are perfectly edible eggs, but they’re smaller than the ones she’ll lay later, and aren’t really optimal for incubation. Weird things occur when a hen first starts laying – she may, for example, lay soft-shelled, rubbery eggs; eggs with no white or yolk; eggs with no shell; or double-yolked eggs. In addition, sometimes the eggs are strangely shaped: nearly round, oval, lumpy. These anomalies occur because the hen’s internal egg-producing system is working out the kinks.