He Thought His Hens Were Acting Strange — Then He Found What They Were Hiding (2 of 3)

Mark frowned. No chicken he owned could lay anything like that.

At first, he thought maybe one of the neighbor kids was playing a prank. But when he reached down, the eggs were warm — freshly laid warm. That meant something had been in his coop that morning.

He checked the walls and found his answer — a gap in the mesh near the roof, big enough for a small bird to slip through. A few feathers clung to the wire, but they weren’t chicken feathers. They were dark, with a faint iridescent sheen.

That night, Mark set up an old trail camera in the henhouse, curious to catch the intruder. The next morning, he played back the footage — and there it was.

A female common grackle, sleek and black with piercing yellow eyes, flitted into the coop just after dawn. She hopped into the nesting box, sat for nearly twenty minutes, and then left… leaving behind another inky black egg.

Mark remembered reading about “nest parasitism,” where wild birds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds — sometimes even in chicken coops — hoping the unsuspecting host will raise their young. Grackles were known for it.

Still, he wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t want to harm the eggs, but he also didn’t want to risk his hens abandoning their own. After some thought, he carefully moved the black eggs into a small straw-lined crate in the feed room, keeping them warm under a heat lamp.

Eighteen days later, the first one hatched.

The chick was tiny, naked, and gawky, its beak already opening wide for food. Two more followed, all of them hungry and loud. Mark fed them small insects and soaked dog kibble — the same way wildlife rehabilitators recommended — until they were strong enough to flap clumsily from the crate.

By early summer, they were fully feathered grackles, sleek and confident, darting around the barnyard in search of bugs. One day, they simply took off, joining a noisy flock in the trees at the edge of his property.

Now, every spring, Mark keeps an eye on that gap in the henhouse roof. He patches it when he can, but sometimes, he leaves it — just to see if any more “mystery eggs” appear.