“At first, I thought it was a ball …”
Holly Brown was out in her backyard in Canada the other day, where her seven chickens foraged and grazed, when she noticed something unexpected.
A circular object she’d never seen before was nestled in the grass near the chicken coop.
“At first, I believed it was a ball the dog found,” Brown told The Dodo in an email. “When I lifted it up, I was surprised to find out it was an egg.”
That day, one of Brown’s hens had apparently strayed from creating a usual egg-shaped egg, instead laying a nearly perfectly spherical egg.
Brown had never seen anything like that.
Here’s the egg alongside a ping pong ball:
Brown decided to share the unusual egg on social media. That’s when she realized how unique her chicken’s gift truly was.
Brown’s acquaintance told him about another story of a woman who found a round egg and later sold it for hundreds of dollars.
The odds of finding a spherical egg were reported to be “one in a billion” at the time — not an official figure, of course, but a good indicative of their rarity.
Meanwhile, Brown has stated that she has no intention of selling her precious spherical egg. She’ll preserve it as a talking piece – a special gift from her beloved birds.
After all, Brown considers her hens to be more than just egg layers (round or otherwise).
“I regard [my chickens] as pets,” Brown said. “Watching their antics every day is entertaining.”
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