As Bill took Maria, our housekeeper to the taxi stand (don't picture a yellow cab, but rather a 16 passenger van transporting those without cars to and from work stopping whereever a passenger waves them down), she told him she had taken one of our eggs - a white egg. She had taken the egg to show her niece because neither Maria nor the niece had ever seen a white egg! She asked Bill suspiciously, "What kind of chicken lays a white egg?" And then asked him if he'd ever seen a snake's egg - perhaps suspecting that it was in fact a snake's egg.
She told me today that she still had the egg in her fridge and she showed it to everyone who came over - not one of her friends or family members have ever seen a white egg. Who knew white eggs would be such a novelty? I guess in a country with 80 some percent brown people, it makes sense to have brown eggs as the norm.
This post made me curious so I did a search on Google to see if I could find the answer. At least a couple of web sites clam that chickens with white earlobes will lay white eggs and chickens with colored earlobes will lay brown eggs. See the video to learn where the chickens earlobes are.
ReplyDeletehttp://urbanchickens.org/frequently-asked-questions#eggcolor
Very interesting... This brought up lots of discussion here also. Here is what we found at http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem03/chem03782.htm
ReplyDeleteChicken Eyes and Eggs
name paul
status other
grade other
location TX
Question - Was just watching a show and they were talking
about the color of eggs.. One of the guest said the color of the
egg is related to the eye color of the hen. Could this be true???
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This is true - almost. Actually, it's not the eye color, but rather the
skin around the sides of the face (known as "earlobes") that correlates
with egg color. The egg color and the earlobe color do not match,
rather it is possible to predict the color of a hen's eggs by looking at
her earlobes. In general, the darker the earlobes, the darker the eggs.
Hens with white earlobes usually produce white eggs. Hens with red,
brown, or black earlobes usually lay brown eggs. There are many
exceptions to this rule, though. For example, chickens of the Silkie
breed often have blue or black earlobes and they generally lay white
eggs. I once had a Silkie with blue earlobes and her eggs were very
light beige - almost white.
As far as we know, there is no particularly good reason why there should
be a correlation between earlobe color and egg color. A hen's body puts
pigmentation into the outermost layer of the egg shell; some breeds
pigment their eggs darkly and some less so. For some reason, those with light earlobes also tend to have lightly-pigmented eggs.
Here is a web site with many good pictures of chicken breeds, giving you
a good look at a chicken's "earlobes":
http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/poultry/chickens/
Christopher Perkins