ABILENE, Texas (KTAB/KRBC) – Many people in the Big Country have chickens they get fresh eggs from every day, but few have ever had a chicken that laid an egg inside of another egg. 

“I never ever heard of it before,” said Cindy Copeland. 

Copeland has been raising chickens for a while, but she has never experienced anything like this.

“She has laid three eggs that has an egg inside of an egg,” said Copeland. “I keep expecting it to be a double yolk because it’s a very large egg. I crack it open and there is another egg,” said Copeland. 

Eggspert Jeremy Voss, Grapevine Farm manager, says a double yolk is pretty common, about a one-in-a-thousand chance, but never in his 6 years of raising chickens has he ever seen a double egg.  

“It’s pretty rare to have a shell within a shell,” said Voss. 

So how is this happening? Voss says chickens have two ovaries that both release eggs, and it’s possible that they each release one at the same time.

“And when it does that, it causes the other one to force back upward, and then gets caught within another egg as it’s in its cycle,” said Voss. “So, it’s a situation where an egg gets pushed back up into the chicken.” 

Voss says it’s so rare that he can’t find any statistics on how often it happens.  

“But it’s really rare, it may be one in one hundred thousand, I don’t know,” said Voss. 

Double eggs tend to be a lot heavier than normal, something Copeland says she noticed.  

“It was five-and-a-half ounces, and my normal egg was an ounce and a half,” said Copeland. 

“Poor chicken, that’s a lot of egg to come out at one time,” said Voss. 

Voss says chickens’ reproductive systems are meant to have lots of eggs, so while it may not have injured the hen, it probably wasn’t her best day. 

Voss says the chicken should be OK if they continue to lay eggs normally.