‘My poor chicken’: Manitoba chicken’s ‘giant’ egg weighs more than twice as much as average
Manitoba farmer Ashely Bartel woke up Thursday morning to an egg-quisite surprise.
Her hen Henrietta may have written a piece of egg-laying history in Manitoba, after the hen laid a huge egg in Bartel’s yard, just southeast of Oakbank.
It weighed 202 grams – more than double the average extra large egg.
“As I got closer, I saw this giant egg lying on the floor. My first thought was, ‘Oh my god, this is such a huge egg.’
“And the second thought was, ‘my poor chicken,'” Bartel told CBC Friday.
It’s something Bartel has never seen before.
While Henrietta — a lavender-colored Maran that weighs about seven pounds herself — often lays large eggs that typically weigh about 75 grams, this one covered Bartel’s entire palm and was about the size of a small mango, she said.
“It’s just absolutely incredible,” Bartel said.
Claire McCaffrey, a communications specialist for the Manitoba Egg Farmers industry association, said such a large egg came as a surprise to her, too.
“It’s definitely the biggest egg we’ve ever heard of here,” she said.
There have been a few other egg exceptionally large chicken eggs in Canada lately, though neither can match Henrietta’s.
Earlier this year, farmers in Leamington, Ontario, found an egg nearly the size of an orange and weighing 175 grams.
Another egg laid in 2017 in Echo Bay, Ontario, weighed 180 grams.
The heaviest chicken egg in the world, according to Guinness World Recordswas laid in New Jersey in 1956 and weighed 454 grams.
Scrambled eggs, anyone?
The size of an egg usually depends on the age of the chicken, McCaffrey said.
Larger eggs, which usually have two yolks instead of one, are usually laid at the beginning or end of a chicken’s reproductive life, when the chicken is going through a lot of hormonal changes.
Henrietta is on the younger side, just over two years old. Her egg had two yolks – one in the first shell and another in a separate egg in the first shell.
LOOK | 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 regular jumbo egg.
“The way a chicken lays their egg is they always have several eggs on the go,” McCaffrey said.
“Maybe one egg didn’t form quite right, but it had a shell, and then the other egg started to form around it.”
While McCaffrey said eggs with a different interior aren’t normally as big as Henrietta’s, many Manitoba hens have laid those.
But given how big Henrietta’s two-for-one egg was, McCaffrey said it’s unlikely she’ll lay another egg that big.
And that might be for the best — Bartel said Henrietta seemed a little sore on Thursday, but was back to her usual self the next day.
“She gets all the credit because she’s the one who had to go through that,” Bartel said.
As for the egg’s fate, Bartel said she would make a meal out of it, as the chicks probably wouldn’t survive if she tried to hatch them.
“Scrambled eggs sound fine to me.”
