waiting for eggs

Don’s quail have long been producing eggs. I posted this photo in May right after this first speckled quail egg was laid. The chickens growing in the coop since spring, however, are not yet of egg-bearing maturity. The white chicken eggs in this photo we bought at a store. Don's chicken eggs will be tan, brown, green and blue.

Don expects his chickens to begin laying in the next few weeks. He has placed a golf ball in a nest box to give the hens the idea where their eggs 'belong.' Um, eggs don't really belong in a nest box conveniently for the chicken farmer and farmette to gather them. They belong in a field nest somewhere. But if we say they belong there, then those hens ought to pay attention to the golf ball.



So the other day we got to talking about eggs being single cell organisms, and how amazing that is. An ostrich egg is the largest single cell organism at 4.5 inches x 7 inches, and weighing 3 lbs. (11.5 centimeters x almost 18 centimeters, and weighing nearly 1.4 kilos). This painted egg from ukrainianegg.com is an ostrich egg.

While we wait for our chickens to lay eggs, did you know:

• oology is the study or collection of eggs; isn't it cool that it looks like it has 3 eggs in it?


• oviparous animals are ones that lay eggs - hey, it's another 'o' egg word (like oeuf in French); I think we could maybe change 'egg' to 'ogg'
  


• the bee hummingbird has the smallest bird egg, around the size of a small pea: o
  


• tiny pores in bird egg shells allow the embryo to breathe


• October 10, 2008 is WORLD EGG DAY ; mark your calendar!


• Sunday’s Zaman says, "According to the 'Executive Guide to World Poultry Trends,' Mexico led the world in 2005 with per capita annual egg consumption of 344. Then comes Japan with 330 eggs consumed per head annually."

My mom used to call one of my brothers 'Egghead' though I don't know why. Egghead is a term for a brainiac. I never thought of that brother as particularly intellectual.

Oh dear, there is too much information about eggs, this could go on forever. Kind of like when a single cell is joined by another and starts to multiply.

I leave you with a link to a wonderful short story (segment actually) called 'The Egg' by Sherwood Anderson. It's worth taking a little time to read it. Ah, the complexities of eggs and their effects on people, in spite of their single cell status.

Here is an excerpt of Anderson's story, linked above. Don, take heed!

One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity. The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably complex. Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life. If disease does not kill them they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a wagon--to go squashed and dead back to their maker. Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent for
curative powders. In later life I have seen how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens. It is intended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is a hopeful literature and declares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a few hens. Do not be led astray by it. It was not written for you. Go hunt for gold on the frozen hills of Alaska, put your faith in the honesty of a politician, believe if you will that the world is daily growing better and that good will triumph over evil, but do not read and believe the literature that is written concerning the hen. It was not written for you.

(above image used under the Wiki commons agreement)