Assessing foraging behavior from yolks

A week or two after adding supplemental lighting to the coop, our pullets started to lay.  First, it was just the australorps (hatched April 20), but soon the Cuckoo Marans (hatched May 17) also began to churn out eggs.  I was sure that these youngest pullets were producing not just because I saw the ladies coming out of the hen house now and then when everyone else was out foraging, but also because we started getting beautiful dark, speckled eggs like this one.

It's helpful to be able to guess who laid each egg, or at least which type of chicken each egg came from.  You can build fancy trap nests, but my favorite method is just to head to the coop when I hear cackling, then see what kind of egg the lady in residence has come up with.  Using that technique, I was able to learn that the darkest eggs were Cuckoo Marans', next darkest were Black Australorps', and the palest eggs were from our White Cochin.

With that data in hand, I could get an idea about how well each breed forages.  I cracked two eggs from each chicken breed into a bowl and took the photo at the top of the page.  If the photo were a clock, 11 and 12 o'clock would be Cuckoo Marans, 2 and 8 o'clock would be White Cochin, and 5 and 6 o'clock would be Black Australorps.  The Cochin yolks are biggest, probably because the others are all still pullet eggs, but what's really striking is the color difference.  All of the eggs look better than a supermarket egg, but the Cochin eggs are quite pale in comparison to those from better foraging breeds. 

I guess my gut feeling is right that our Cochin is befuddled by the concept of rustling up her own grub --- yet another reason to plan to put her in the stew pot sooner rather than later.  It's always hard to make the decision to cull a hen, but you know what they say --- you've got to break a few eggs to make an omelet.  (Research sure is tasty at this time of year.)