Poor Richard’s Almanac

Our hen lays blue eggs. January 4, 2015

Since part of Poor Richard’s Almanac involves chickens (see our headline), occasionally our friend Ben likes to update our readers on all things chicken, especially when they’re happening here. Silence Dogood and I keep six chickens here at Hawk’s Haven, the cottage home we share in the precise middle of nowhere, PA. Each chicken is a different heirloom breed, so we have a colorful brood—red, black-and-white, gold, white with black edging (the most beautiful, in my opinion), red with black and gold, and spangled black.

They’re all beautiful and fun to watch, but today, it’s the “red with black and gold” that I want to talk about. She’s an Ameraucana, descended from the nearly wild Araucanas of South America. And she looks wild, with a great ruff of feathers around her head, making her look more like a rooster than a hen. (We don’t keep roosters here, they’re aggressive and pointless unless you want your hens to produce chicks; they’ll still lay eggs without roosters, but the eggs will be sterile, just the way a vegetarian like Silence likes them.) She’s also thinner than the other chickens, another sign of her “next-to-wild” origin.

Our chickens are pullets, first-year hens, so they had to fatten up (no problem around here) before they could get into laying mode, which began this fall. Suddenly, we began finding beautiful brown and bisque eggs in our nestboxes. But then the hold-your-breath watch began. Ameraucanas are often called “Easter egg chickens” because they lay colored eggs. The eggs can be blue, olive green, green, even pink. But a given hen will lay the same color all her life. If you only have one Ameraucana, what color will she lay?

Fortunately for us, our Ameraucana eventually laid an egg, and it was blue! We’ve been so lucky that over our decades of chicken-keeping, our Ameraucanas (and we’ve only had one at a time) have all laid blue eggs. Our friend Ben does not mean some pale stain on a white egg, either—these eggs are sky blue, robin’s egg blue. They are so gorgeous, Silence can barely bring herself to cook them! Mind you, they taste just like our other wonderfully fresh, organic, free-range, nutrient-packed eggs. It’s just the color that distinguishes them. But what a color!

There are only two of us, so we’d never want more than five or six chickens (as it is, we’re giving away six-packs of eggs to all our friends and neighbors). But if we had a larger spread, it would be very tempting to get a few more Ameraucanas!

If you don’t have chickens but would like to try blue eggs, of course you can try your local farmers’ market, but I’ve never seen them at any of ours. Where Silence and I have found them is at a local health food store, where a local farmer has made beautiful 8-packs of multicolored eggs. Maybe high-end groceries like Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Wegman’s would have them, too. (But remember, you’re paying for the color of the shell, not the contents.)

Chickens lay blue eggs!!!