Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

This incredibly tiny egg was laid by our Red Leghorn. She has only been laying eggs for a few weeks as she is a young bird but all have been normal size until this one appeared yesterday! We do however know why: unfortunately she was injured the day before yesterday and ended up with a nasty wound to the side of her head (we think a cockerel may have been a bit too aggressive when mating OR it may have been one of the geese who do at times behave like bullies).
Whilst it wasn't a life threatening injury, it will have made the poor bird stressed. This will have affected her egg-laying cycle with the result that a normal egg was not able to be produced. It takes around 26 hours for an egg to be formed and laid and stress of any kind can affect the process quite significantly. As well as small eggs, a stressed chicken may lay eggs with bumpy shells or no shells or that are strange shapes. The makeup of an egg is quite complex (more on this another day) so there is a lot that can go wrong.
When we choose eggs to incubate and hatch into chicks we choose the best ones possible: those that have no bumps, are a perfect shape, not too large, etc. We cannot see inside the egg to check so have to hope that if the outside looks okay, the inside may be okay too. The good news for our lovely Leghorn is that her wound healed very quickly and today all was back to normal.