Soft Eggs - 24 weeks old.

[Anonymous]

Hello

Advice needed please..

Background: got 6 hybrid day old chicks in January 2011. These have been reared as pets and are a mixture of crosses. 5 of the 6 are laying almost daily, the first started in week 15 (and is now all broody - but thats a different problem!), however the last 1 pops out a soft egg daily which is quickly eaten by the others. Yesterday it happens as she walked across the grass and seemed to arrive on the ground jsut as if she had had a poo. She is 24 weeks old now.

There is plenty of grit available, i even mix some in their food. They get layers pellets, fresh greens and most days get a few hours in the garden. All the chickens are healthy and happy. The one not laying appears to be bottom of the pecking order.

The only other issue is that when they were day olds, and for the first few weeks, the same bird struggled to walk on the slippy lament floors inside. When the rest of the chicks were running around she would do the splits and seemed to have weak leg muscles, over time her strength improved and she began running about the floor with the rest of them. She is now a big strong bird and has had no other health issues. All other birds have been laying for weeks.

Am I just too impatient for results...or should (as suggested by an exotic bird breeder) give her some liquid calcium in her water?

Thanks in advance.

Philip

 

[E3lx]

Hi, welcome to the forum 99 99 99
I had a hen who would lay soft shelled eggs, she sometimes popped them out like a poo just like yours does. She was also bottom of the pecking order, and didnt really have access to the grit. I just gave more grit and waited for a bit, and soon she started laying properly.
How long has this been going on for? If its been more than a few weeks i would add liquid calcium to the water and see how she does on that.
Hope this helps. :evil:

 

[Anonymous]

Hi,I will occasionaly get a soft shelled from anyone of my birds,it has the inner membrane but no outer shell.When this happens it is because the egg passess too quickly through the hens reproductive system so doesn't stay long enough in the shelling area to become shelled.
most of my birds have at least once layed an egg like this(I'm still able to pick them up and remove them)if I got more than one egg like this I would definitely add liquid calcium to the hens drinking water.

 

[chrismahon]

Hi there, she is still very young and may settle down. Common denominator is the lowest in the pecking order. We had the same with little Annie. It is caused by stress due to constant bullying. If you get a fox around the coop at night, or anything else for that matter, the hens will dump their eggs early without shells as a natural stress reaction -probably because it then allows them to fly higher and faster to escape. You could separate the lowest two but may not have a spare coop and run though. Do your nest boxes have a privacy curtains made from a rubber car mat cut into strips? This works well to isolate the little hen during her most vunerable period and ours did lay eggs with a shell afterwards but they were always thin. Otherwise the other hens will bully her out of the nest and she has no option but to lay 'on the run'.
The layers pellets have enough calcium in. The grit just helps digestion in the gizzard by a grinding action on the food.

 

[Anonymous]

1 of our hens was constantly laying soft or fragile eggs. Assumed it was a calcium deficiency so upped her calcium but it didn't help at all. Turned out she was low on Vit D - she'd been broody the last few months of laying season so was either hidden away in the hen house, under the hedge or somewhere in the undergrowth so she wasn';t getting enough sun (sunlight helps many mammals/birds bodies produce Vit D which is essential for the digestion/absorption of calcium - without it they can't utilize the calcium in their diet). Then obviously we had autumn/winter & it wasn't until we started to get the long sunny days earlier this year that her eggs got back to normal. Wasn't til then that I realised her Vit D would have been low (had I done I would have looked into some sort of supplement to help her).

 

[chrismahon]

Hi Sejjie70,
Thanks for that. Our Bluebell is a shy but strange creature. She spends a lot of time just recently in the coop rather than in the run so I think she's being bullied. She was laying OK with curtains on the nest boxes but has just stared laying thin shelled eggs. Its been quite dark recently and perhaps hiding in the coop has caused a vitamin D deficiency?