Christmas Alien Egg
By Annette Fox
December 2006
Here are several other articles about weird eggs. If your bird has laid one, it might be an isolated case or a sign of big trouble. For your bird's sake take the time to read these and understand.
Internal and False Layer
Penny's Surgery
Weird Eggs
Weird Eggs - Peter Brown
We had a very unexpected and unusual surprise on Christmas Day. Daniel had gone to raise the hatch door to the hen house in the morning, and (as usual) the first one down from the perch was Yoko. She skipped out towards the food hopper but then did a double take on something which she had just passed, by the hatch itself. She took an investigative peck at it, which rang alarm bells for Daniel who raced around the enclosure fencing to the front door of the hen house in order to be able to reach the object of interest before Yoko or any of the hens harmed themselves.

What he saw was an unidentifiable creamy coloured object the size of an egg but elongated like an irregular sausage about 3 inches in length, with curves and bumps not unlike a pod of broad beans. Feeling under pressure from the three hens still on the perch waiting to descend, and not wishing to pick up something which could potentially harm everyone, he grabbed a piece of newspaper from the top of the nestbox and used that to pick up the pod to remove it from the hen house.

This Is What It Looked Like
(the flakes on the surface are bits of sawdust)
A couple of hours later, after several photos had been taken, it was decided that we simply had to dissect the thing in order to satisfy at least some of our curiosity - or indeed inflame it more.

Using sugar tongs and a kitchen knife, Annette cut it lengthways in half. A clear liquid squirted out, for which only Grace was prepared. (She works adjacent to a pathology laboratory, so is used to hearing shrieks of "There are maggots coming from it - maggots!" or "I was not prepared for that smell!") Indeed the clear liquid had an unpleasant odour rather like a day old soiled nappy.

We didn't know what to expect inside, but we didn't expect this.
We were fascinated to find what was revealed. The "shell" was as thick as a banana skin and made up of three to four layers. The inside was made up of what appeared to be thin layers of polythene all concertinaed together in frills. It seemed as tough as polythene as well. There was no liquid, but it was moist, like the inside of a cooked juicy sausage, as was its colour and texture. In other words, get a raw sausage, separate the inside from the skin then squeeze it together and force it all into the skin of miniature banana, steam it and you're more or less there.

Grace trawled through the internet to find answers to our questions, and came across a website with pictures of something very similar but not providing answers.

A few months ago Penny was having difficulty laying an egg. She had been uncomfortable for hours and we kept close to her to keep an eye on her without interfering. Finally, she passed her egg, only it turned out to be a small amount of mucus and what looked like a cocktail sausage. The passing of this gave her visible relief, and she shook herself, gave a big sigh and stood still to recover. The other hens though spotted the sausage like object, pecked at it and - Yoko in particular - carried on eating it until it was all gone. Annette saw all of this but did not believe her eyes. What was it that she had actually seen? She told Daniel about it, but he had not seen anything similar.

Now here was something in the same strange family of "weird things passed by a hen" which all of us could see, examine and preserve with photos.
>> More Photos of the strange egg
Brown Egg Blue Egg