My one or both of my French Wheaten Marans is laying a wind egg about every week. They haven’t come in to lay yet and I wasn’t expecting them to until later in the spring. My cockerel of the same breed and age is mounting them regularly (as he is all my girls, except the ex-bats who have something to say about it)! I have kept chickens for four years now and had never seen a wind egg before and Dave is my first cockerel. Are these regular wind eggs his sperm being packaged as an egg? I have included a picture if that helps.
Victoria Roberts says:
A wind egg is the colloquial name for a fully formed egg that does not have a yolk in it. These are generally much smaller than normal eggs and are a blip in egg production, either at the beginning or end of lay when the hormone level has not stabilised and are nothing to worry about, your young hen will settle down and begin to lay proper eggs once the days really start to lengthen. The cockerel has nothing to do with wind eggs and his sperm is held within special storage glands in the oviduct (egg tube), only moving up to the infundibulum (funnel that the yolk falls in to) when a yolk is ovulated in order to fertilise it. The lifespan of a sperm once it swims out of the storage gland in response to the ovulation hormone is minutes, so no spare sperm are likely to be included within a normal egg. Since there is no yolk in a wind egg, the sperm will still be in the storage glands.
