A mum was left stunned when a hen she saved from the slaughterhouse laid a giant egg – twice the size of a normal one.
Steph Carr, 30, said her two-year-old chicken Linda had produced the ‘massive egg’, which weighed a whopping 109g.
Eggs bought in supermarkets generally weigh around 50g.
The warren hen had previously failed to lay for over a week and appeared ‘slow on her feet’, leaving Steph worried.
But when the mum-of-three inspected the coop on June 2 at her allotment in Settle, North Yorks., she found the chicken had recovered after laying the huge egg.
Steph later turned the egg - a double-yoker - into a massive omelette that was then devoured by her kids and partner, Johnny Greenbank, 32.
She said: “I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ I think probably the whole allotment heard me.
"I was like, ‘What is that?’ It was huge. Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it. I was quite worried about the chicken, and I wondered if she was ok.
"But she seemed a lot happier, to be honest. You would be if you needed to lay an egg that big.
“We kept it until all the family were in. We had a massive omelette with it – the yokes were really big.”
Steph said she had saved Linda from the slaughterhouse when she became surplus to requirements at a battery farm near Blackpool, Lancs, a year ago.
She had signed up to take the chicken under her wing, which would have otherwise been killed and turned into animal food despite being a successful layer.
The fowl - given the name Linda - then joined Steph’s other chickens happily living out their days on her allotment.
But Steph became concerned when the previously plucky bird began to move slowly and was lethargic.
She said: “She seems quite frail compared to the other chickens. She’s always been the weakest one really, quite slow on her feet.
“And she hadn’t laid for quite a while - probably a week and a half.
“She’s normally quite peppy and alert, and she was quite quiet and slow, she was the last one to come out of the hutch.
"She wasn’t herself, I could tell. She wasn’t clucking as much.”
Steph had gone to check on her chickens as usual when she found the huge egg in their nesting box.
And she knew it belonged to Linda due to the colouration and texture of the shell.
She added: “We thought, ‘It’s definitely her's because our other hens are quite a lot younger – and we can tell their eggs because the shells are different."
Steph said she had taken pictures of the egg before safely whisking it back to her home where she later showed it to her kids and partner.
And she then weighed it and placed it in an egg box to demonstrate the size difference.
Steph added: “When I put it into the egg box with the others, it wouldn’t even close because it was so big. And then I just thought ‘I need to weigh it’.
“It was 109 grams. It was a lot bigger – even just by sight, it was massive.”
