Chicken Twins!

And the surprises just keep on coming...

Last week, we had an egg with no shell. It was likely the first egg laid by the second of our eight hens to start laying. She probably just wanted that thing out of there before it had a chance to get its shell. We do now have two hens laying and we've gotten two eggs each day since Sunday.

Yesterday, we got a gigantic egg. As you can see by the photo above, the large egg was quite a bit bigger than the smaller ones we've been getting so far. I don't have an accurate scale to  measure the weight of these eggs, but the large egg weighs about twice as much as the smaller one.

I wondered if the larger egg would have two yolks and today I cracked it open to find out. Sure enough, there were two yolks!

One of the yolks broke when I cracked the egg open, but you can see
there are two yolks!

According to Wikipedia:

Double-yolk eggs occur when ovulation occurs too rapidly, or when one yolk becomes joined with another yolk.  Although heredity causes some hens to have a higher propensity to lay double-yolked eggs, these occur more frequently as occasional abnormalities in young hens beginning to lay.

Usually a double-yolked egg will be longer and thinner than an ordinary single-yolk egg. Double-yolked eggs usually only lead to observed successful hatchlings under human intervention, as the chickens interfere with each other's hatching process and die.

Occasionally, we'd get a double yolker when we'd gather eggs from the neighbor's chickens. I would imagine this isn't our last one either. I think it's pretty cool.