laying soft eggs???

[MrsOnTheMove]

Got our chickens about a month ago - one has been laying for a couple of weeks, the second laid her first egg two days ago, nothing yesterday - then today there were 2 eggs in the nest box.

The dc's have just found a very small soft egg in the garden, which i am 100% sure was not there yesterday - I assume chicken no.3 has laid it today but what about the fact that it was very soft???

They have pellets, grit and corn mix to eat. Any suggestions...

Erm, I seem to remember this from when I kept chickens as a child. I think that hens do occasionally lay 'soft' eggs (blip in the egg making system!). If this become a pattern then I think lack of calcium may be the cause.

Give it a few days and see if it sorts itself out.

thanks clarinsgirl - I wondered if it was because it was her first egg? she has the same diet as the others, so will see what happens

bump..

got woken at 5.30am by one of the chickens making a lot of noise. Let them out of coop to find a broken soft egg under the perch - am trying to work out if it was the same chicken to lay it as yesterday or if one of the others has started laying soft eggs?

Is there anything I can add to their diet to stop this - they have grit as well as pellets, corn in the afternoon and free range all day?

It probably is because she is just coming into lay. There is a product you can add to the water, which is liquid calcium, but tbh for now I would just see if they harden up. The other thing you could do is to bake some broken egg shells and put those in with the grit.

I've kept some egg shells from this morning, had planned on baking them and adding to grit today.

thank you for your help - having a small panic as we are away next week and mum is looking after the chickens. Hoping it is nothing serious, I googled 'soft eggs' and found too much info...

I'm sure it's just that they're just starting to lay - they can lay weird eggs before they get settled into laying.