CONTENT WARNING: Video of a chicken popping an egg out of her pooper.
For real though, how?
Diamond is a special little hen. She is number 3 in the supreme pecking order of our run, lead investigator, stunt chicken, and bedtime rounder-upper patrol lady, among her many other accolades and titles.
But there’s one accolade that I’m most curious about – layer of the largest eggs in our flock.
Diamond is a Sapphire Gem, a “premium” chicken breed brought to the USA by chicken breeders from the Czech Republic. Their plumage ranges from dark to light lavender (grey) hues, with darker plumage on their head and necks.
Sapphire Gem hens can weigh on average up to 7 lbs (3.17 kg) according to (and I’ll be honest here) a quick glance at DuckDuckGo search results. They typically lay around 280 large eggs a year, which about tracks with what we’ve been seeing with both Diamond and her Sapphire sibling Chi-chan. Kind of.
You see, Diamond lays a big egg. Like on average 85 grams big. According to the USA egg size chart on Wikipedia a large chicken egg weighs between 56-63 grams, which is about right for 7.2 lb (3.26 kg) chonker Chi-chan’s egg laying record.
But for little 5.2 lb (2.35 kg) Diamond?
Her eggs skip an entire rank straight to the top: breezing through BOTH large and XL right onto the heaviest class – Jumbo.
The starting point for Jumbo weight is 70.9 grams. Diamond’s most recent egg weight was a whopping 84 grams. That is a helluva huevo for such a small hen.
So that brings us to the questions of why and how.
Why does she lay big eggs like this?
The answer is relatively simple – genetics. Chickens have been selectively bred for centuries for a plethora of reasons like meat, eggs, appearance, temperament, etc. And the Sapphire Gem breed is based along Barred Plymouth Rock and Blue Plymouth Rock breed lines. So for all intents and purposes, her genes drew from the lineage lottery and came up with big egg, little hen. This does worry me a bit since modern chickens with wonky genetics can have some serious reproductive issues, but luckily Diamond seems happy and healthy these days.
Ok, so selective breeding for big egg genes is why she lays Jumbo-sized bombs. But how the HECK does this petite lady drop them? I’ll let her answer in the form of a video essay:
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