Ashley Bartel had quite the surprise last month when she visited her backyard chicken coop, located just southeast of Oakbank, Manitoba, in Canada.
When she went out to collect her eggs, as usual, she found a massive egg on the ground.
Upon discovering the enormous egg on the ground, Bartel’s initial reaction was a mixture of awe and concern for her chicken.
The egg covered her entire palm and was about the size of an orange!
She believes her seven-pound Lavender Maran, lovingly named Henrietta, produced this giant egg.
Most of Henrietta’s eggs are 70 to 80 grams—typical for large grocery store eggs, but this one was certainly an outlier.
It’s common for hens to slowly produce slightly larger eggs the older they grow to be, but Henrietta is still relatively young at two years old.
At 202 grams, it’s the equivalent of:
- Two turkey eggs (2 x 200 grams)
- Three extra large eggs (3 x 63.8 grams)
- Four medium eggs (4 x 49.6 grams)
- Five guinea eggs (5 x 40 grams)
- Twenty-two quail eggs (22 x 9 grams)
Henrietta’s egg is suspected to actually be two eggs, with one resting inside the other like a nesting doll—probably with two yolks and two eggshells.
While Henrietta made an impressively large egg for a hen her size, there have been other instances with even bigger chicken eggs.
In fact, Henrietta’s egg is only half the size of the world record holder.
The world record for the heaviest chicken egg is held by a White Leghorn hen in Vineland, New Jersey.
It weighed 454 grams—more than a pound.
It had double yolks and double egg shells and was produced on February 25th, 1956.
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