‘My poor chicken’: Manitoba hen’s ‘ginormous’ egg weighs more than twice as much as average | 24CA News
Manitoba farmer Ashely Bartel woke as much as an eggs-quisite shock Thursday morning.
Her hen Henrietta could have made a little bit of Manitoba egg-laying historical past, after the rooster laid a large egg at Bartel’s farmyard simply southeast of Oakbank.
It weighed 202 grams — greater than double the load of the common extra-large egg.
“When I got close I could see this ginormous egg on the ground. And my first thought was, ‘Oh my goodness, this is such a huge egg.’
“And second thought was, ‘my poor rooster,'” Bartel told CBC on Friday.
It’s something Bartel has never seen before.
While Henrietta — a lavender Maran who weighs about seven pounds herself — often lays large eggs that are typically about 75 grams, this one covered Bartel’s entire palm and was about the size of a small mango, she said.
“It’s simply completely unimaginable,” Bartel mentioned.
Claire McCaffrey, a communications specialist for the industry association Manitoba Egg Farmers, said an egg that big was a surprise to her, too.
“It’s undoubtedly the largest egg we have ever heard of right here,” she said.
There have been a couple of other egg-ceptionally large chicken eggs in Canada recently, although neither has measured up to Henrietta’s.
Earlier this year, farmers in Leamington, Ont., found an egg nearly the size of an orange, weighing 175 grams.
Another egg laid in 2017 in Echo Bay, Ont., weighed 180 grams.
The heaviest chicken egg in the world, according to Guinness World Records, was laid in New Jersey in 1956, weighing 454 grams.
Scrambled eggs, anyone?
The size of an egg usually depends on the age of the hen, McCaffrey said.
Larger eggs, which tend to have two yolks instead of one, are typically laid at the beginning or end of a hen’s reproductive life, when the hen goes through a lot of hormonal changes.
Henrietta is on the younger side, at just over two years old. Her egg had two yolks — one inside the first shell and another inside a separate egg within the first shell.
WATCH | See what’s inside Henrietta’s giant egg:
Ashley Bartel couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw the size of the egg her hen Henrietta laid on Thursday. It tipped the scales at a massive 202 grams, almost three times the weight of a normal jumbo egg.
“The means {that a} rooster really lays their egg is that they at all times have a number of eggs on the go,” McCaffrey said.
“Maybe the one egg did not fairly kind correctly however did have a shell on it, after which the opposite egg began to kind round it.”
While McCaffrey said eggs with another inside are not normally as big as the one Henrietta laid, many Manitoba chickens have laid those.
But given just how big Henrietta’s two-for-one egg was, McCaffrey said it’s unlikely she’ll lay another one that size.
And that might be for the best — Bartel said Henrietta seemed a bit sore Thursday, but was back to her usual self the next day.
“She will get all of the credit score, as a result of she’s the one which needed to endure that,” Bartel said.
As for the fate of the egg, Bartel said she’ll turn it into a meal, since the chicks wouldn’t be likely to survive if she tried to incubate them.
“Scrambled eggs sounds simply wonderful with me.”
