Wednesday, March 09, 2005

All Eggs Great and Small




My blog friend Shannon over at the Not So Virtual Homestead was writing recently about a huge egg that one of her chickens surprised her with.

We got a surprise too, but it was in the opposite direction.

One of the Dominique chickens must have gotten tired of laying normal eggs, and left us this tiny one.

A normal Dominique egg is on the left for comparison.

I didn't realize until I uploaded the pictures, that the depth of field on the macro setting was so shallow that to have the little egg in sharp focus meant that the normal one was a little fuzzy. Oops.

By that time my curiosity had gotten the best of me and I'd already cracked open the lilliputian egg to see what it looked like inside. So, no do-overs.

The inside looked pretty much like a normal egg in miniature.

(My sister recently made a comment about my liberal use of 50-cent words, so I had to work in "lilliputian" just for her.)

4 comments:

Rurality said...

Thanks for visiting Mary! I'll be reading about your adventures too.

Shannon, there was a double-yolker in one of the eggs we gave my Mom, but the egg itself was normal sized.

Oh yeah, I've also got a broody hen who's trying to hatch out golf balls at the moment. (Bunch of crazy chickens...)

Ed said...

You're the Edward Weston of eggs...and that's wacky cool!

Maktaaq said...

That's a huge difference!

Well, if I get what your sister means by fifty-cent words, I think it was Mark Twain that said "I never use police officer where cop will do."

(Btw, the week before my grandmother died, we went to her farm and slaughtered all her chickens so the foxes wouldn't get them. My job was to pluck the chickens, then to clean their insides. The half-formed eggs inside the chickens were amazing!)

Rurality said...

Orphyus - and here I was going for the Walker Evans of eggs... let us now praise famous chickens... LOL.

Maktaaq what makes it even worse is that she actually said "big words" and I'm the one who changed it to "50 cent words". (I'm hopeless). My grandmother used to keep chickens, and she'd wring their necks to kill them. I guess they thought I was too young at the time to let me watch, so I've never seen the process.