Green eggs, but no ham...

After months of wondering why my chickens were being too lazy to lay eggs, they finally gave us a Christmas miracle. On Christmas Eve they laid their very first egg. This is unusual since the lack of a sufficient number of daylight hours usually means chickens stop laying during the winter months. However, that is not the only weird thing about this egg. The strangest part is...it's green! Yep green eggs.

Now, for those of you that have been a reader for awhile, you may recall that last June we played a joke on my daughter by painting an egg gold and putting it in the pen for her to find. (We still have not told her it was a joke.) See the following for that story: The Golden Egg So when my daughter brought this green egg to me I figured it was paybacks. I figured someone dyed an egg green and placed it in the pen. Well, unless someone has a lot of time on their hands to keep repeating it, the egg is real. We have found about a half dozen more of them since then. We are getting at least one green egg a day now.

I have Googled "Green Eggs" and after sorting through all the Dr. Suess links, I can only find a small number of articles about blue eggs. These are laid by some rare South-American chickens. My chickens do not look like the ones in the pictures for those articles. Besides, those are blue eggs, not green. I even called my friend Dena since she raised chickens as a kid. Her purely scientific expert response was, "Maybe they are alien chickens?" Uhhhh....I don't think so Dena. lol

The only thing I can think of, and this is strictly a theory, is that the blue spotlight I put inside their coop to help keep them a little warmer is affecting them? I am considering changing it to a red bulb to see what happens. I had originally thought of putting a red bulb in anyway but, thought that looked too much like the heat lamps they use for keeping the roasted chickens warm at the supermarket! It just seemed to sadistic. If changing the light changes the eggs, I am going to start producing eggs pre-dyed for Easter!

Let me hear your theories on my alien chickens! In the meantime here is a picture of the first egg. Note: The white ones in the carton are from the store. I used them for comparison.