Weird Egg

Not long ago I discovered a weird egg.  It was weird enough that the egg wasn't in the nest box but was sitting on the elephant planter, but what was really weird was it's lack of shell.  Uck!

See, it's just a membrane, with the egg inside, and some powdery bits of shell on the surface.  It was squishy like a ball of jelly, or a frog egg, and really brought home to me the amphibian ancestry of birds.  I put in the refrigerator for Brandon to use for his breakfast, but for some reason he never used it.  Who's the chicken?  

Speaking of weird eggs... Pork Fat has returned to live with her flock at my parents house.  She never laid an egg for me, and her bad habit of perching on my back porch was driving us a little crazy.  The final straw was when we opened the hot tub lid and one of her poops was catapulted into the hot tub by the dangling edge of the tarp we keep over the lid.  NO!!!  Contamination!!  And it doesn't matter to me if the chicken poop is removed and the tub is dosed in bacteria killing toxic chemicals, once I saw what happened, I had to drain it and clean it, which meant several days before it was back on line.  Brandon was ready to make Pork Fat stew right away, but mom said she would take her back.   

She was a very friendly bird to people, but she never fit in with Mrs. Hall and June.  To make sure she wasn't laying eggs somewhere where I couldn't find them, I locked everyone in the chicken coop for several days.  See her, crouching with her head in the corner?  

At first I blamed Mrs. Hall for being such a bully, but once they were locked in the coop together, I spent some time watching their interactions when Pork Fat couldn't run away.  Mrs. Hall would peck her until she squawked and stuck her head in the corner.  After a few moments, everyone would relax.  Mrs. Hall and June would begin to preen, and ignore Pork Fat.  Pork Fat would slowly come out of her crouch, begin to preen too, and then for some reason I couldn't detect, would try to scoot her body under the belly of one of the others.  They didn't like this, and the whole thing would start over.  She's a weird egg, for sure.

After she returned to my parents flock, it wasn't long before mom wanted to know why I taught her to fly on peoples heads!  Ha!  Like I could teach that chicken anything.