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Chickens - Soft Egg shell


mary

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Hi, I am the proud new owner of 6 chickens which are about 5 months old.  3 are now laying, which are the three 'brown bare neck' chickens but the three 'white sussex' are not as yet.  I keep getting these odd eggs.  I end up with this soft shell, membrane all curled up and a normal looking yolk and white next to it.  I have read that you need to make sure the chickens have grit and to give them back their egg shells ground up for them to eat, but it is still happening.  I give them chicken feed\pellets and house scraps to eat.  Could it be because they are young chickens, or have i got a barren chicken!!!

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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Its better to buy crushed sea shells. You can get them from most animal food shops. Some foods come with sea shells already mixed. There are also grit blocks you can buy which help with their digestion and these do contain some shells as well.

Feeding them egg shells can cause the hens to start pecking at their own eggs.

There is nothing so tasty as your first egg from your own chickens.

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Concurring with Bugbear, chickens need to have grit mixed with their feed which should be available from the same place you buy feed.  As an aside, once you get an 'egg eater' (which can happen even if you don't fed them egg shells), you need to kill the chicken as you will never change the habit.

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The soft shells seem to be a maturity thing, they grow out of it with the occasional regression when coming back into lay after winter. You must check very regularly for soft eggs and remove them PDQ, as Scooby says once you get an egg eater the only cure is culling them. We add crushed sea shells to the food to give them the grit they need.

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Not enough calcium. I don't know if these are the first chickens for the OP but all eggs are 'rubbery' when they exit the chicken and then harden off very, very quickly. If there is not enough calcium in the feed then they won't harden. The difference between a rubbery egg and a hard egg with thin shell is very small so if your other chickens produce hard but thin shells you need to add more calcium anyway.

We use a blended, pellet food from Gemme Verte (think thats the right spelling). Its a bio feed with calcium and a extra vitamins, its very good and its cheap, 14 Euros for a really big sack.

Of course giving them the right food and getting them to eat it are two different issues, we still get the odd rubbery egg now and again (about every 6 or 7 weeks).

By the way I love having chickens, in to my third year now. They do have personalities (sad to say some of ours have names and do respond to them) and are fascinating to watch. In the summer evening we sit by our river with a drink surrounded by our chickens and some even sit on our laps. We have one I call Shoelaces because she thinks its great fun to creep up on people and undo their shoelaces. Ours have a 7,500m2 garden to run round, a happy chicken is a productive chicken.

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