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He Thought His Hens Were Acting Strange — Then He Found What They Were Hiding

Mark Ellison’s mornings on the farm were always the same — a quick cup of coffee, then out to tend the hens as the first light touched the fields. But one chilly April day, something made him stop mid-step inside the coop. At first, he brushed it off, thinking maybe one of the neighbor kids had been fooling around. Then he reached down, and his hand froze — what he touched was warm. That meant something had been inside his coop that very morning…

Mark Ellison had been keeping chickens for over 20 years, and in that time he’d learned one thing for certain — hens are creatures of habit. They lay in the same spots, at the same times, and their eggs look the same week after week.

So when he stepped into his henhouse one April morning, coffee mug in hand, he nearly dropped it.

In the corner nesting box, tucked neatly into the straw alongside two pale brown eggs from his Leghorns, were three greenish-blue color with purple speckles eggs. They were smaller than a chicken’s, shaped more like a teardrop than an oval, and their shells were so smooth they seemed to shine in the dim morning light.