ॐ Steamboat Island Farm

Yes! Green Eggs! Highly sought after in backyard flocks who are looking to set themselves apart from the crowd, green eggs are eye-catching and unique.
They can range anywhere from pale minty green, to seafoam, pistachio, even darker khaki and moss green. I personally haven’t seen anything in the darker olive shades from my lines, but I hear that they’re out there too.
Not only are they green, but they can also have spots, splotches, and speckles, which range from white, cream-colored, brown, darker greens, and yes, even purple!
My favorite egg shades are minty green with purple spots. They really are little dinosaur eggs!

Just like an oil painting has several layers that determine what we finally experience as color, so do chicken eggs. Egg color is generally determined by 3 things – the color of the shell’s calcium, the exterior “paint” itself, and finally the glossy protective bloom.

For all chickens, an egg takes about 26 hours to form. At about 5-6 hours in, the calcium of the egg shell starts forming. Some chickens have a genetic trait that causes them to leak Oocyanin (notice cyan in that name?) into their white calcium, turning the calcium cyan-blue. More on what caused this fascinating genetic trait later…

Then, during the final 3-4 hours of forming, SOME chickens spray a a tinted brown pigment, called protoporphyrin, over the top of the eggshell. Go check your brown eggs. They’re white on the inside! Some chicken breeds don’t produce protoporphyrin, and some do. Why? Well, human breeding. But also, because some dinosaurs buried their eggs (white), and some laid them atop the ground (brown)! Birds didn’t bury, they open nested, so their eggs became light brown. When we bred for commercial production, we accidentally devolved our brown egg-laying cluckers back a step. That’s right – white eggs are the anomaly, not the standard. White eggs are an egg-burying lizard trait!
And I say spray because, like a sprayer, sometimes things get gunked-up and the pigment doesn’t come out uniform. It can splotch, resulting in the highly prized speckles and spots people love. Pigment isn’t consistent. Some breeds, like Marans, produce LOTS of it, making very dark eggs. Others, like Rhode Island Reds, produce very little, making very light eggs. There’s also more of it at the beginning of the season, when a hen hasn’t been laying for a while, than there is available later on in the season.

Finally, in the last hour or two, the hen adds a wet protein substance, a cuticle, that we call the bloom. This is a glossy, protective layer that fills in microscopic pores and protects the embryo inside from bacteria and disease, and makes the eggs shelf-stable. This is also what gets washed away in commercial facilities, requiring them to be refrigerated.
Acting like a frosted glass, refracting how light plays on the surface, the bloom causes all sorts of changes in the egg’s tonal colors, it can add a hint of dusty pastel, or a milky whitish or even grey appearance. Sometimes the bloom also carries just a touch of that same protoporphyrin pigment, resulting in anything from pale hints of pinks all the way to opaque plums.

When we take a blue-egg laying chicken and cross it with a brown egg laying chicken, most of the offspring (not all) will end up laying green eggs. At least for one generation.
We’ve been making hybrid green egg layers for decades. In fact, we’re pretty good at it. We call them Easter Eggers, or Olive Eggers, or even Moss Eggers. But, we have to wait a year to see what the resulting children’s eggs look like, and you might end up with a non-green layer. Also, subsequent generations fail out – you have to continue breeding in more blue or more brown layers, and that takes a lot of work, maintaining multiple lines and roosters.

They are the absolute rarest exception to the rule. They are a true-breeding chicken line. They lay green eggs without needing to be crossed with another breed every generation.

They also stand out for numerous other qualities, the least of which are their stunning single-combs, lack of beards, and presence of tails (gasp!). All of these are often times lacking in the normal green hybrids.
…Although, I admit, I kind of like the bearded chickens. Their weird fluffy cheeks grew on me. It cracks me up walking around with my “beard”/hen.

But they don’t stop there. The breed was made to be a powerhouse producer, and whether you’re looking for plumage color options or high feed-conversion ratios, they’ve got a lot to offer above just their green eggs.

Believe it or not, it took a virus to bring us all this amazing color goodness. The story starts with the infamous Araucana chicken breed and the Endogenous Avian Retrovirus (EAV-HP). Or, actually, the Araucana’s ancestor breed, the Mapuche chicken. Or, actually, being fair, there’s an Asian version of this exact same story, affecting 2 other breeds. The EAV-HP attacked twice in separate continents, but let’s stick with the Araucana’s history.
The EAV-HP retrovirus started infecting chickens in South America several hundred years ago. The virus lost the war, but not before it rewrote some of the chicken’s genetic code regarding …liver proteins. And now, those chickens make liver proteins outside of their liver… even in their oviduct and shell manufacturing glands… where the calcium acts like a big sponge and sucks them up… which turns the calcium…. blue!
This protein was called oocyanin – literally egg-cyan-pigment. It’s also called biliverdin, or literally, bile-green-pigment. You and I are probably more familiar with bilirubin, bile-ruby-pigment. All the same stuff.
It’s theorized that the Mapuche people selectively kept infected chickens over non-infected chickens, because they thought blue eggs were cool! But that wasn’t the only genetic anomaly re-written by retroviruses. Chickens down there also lost their tail feathers, doomed to walk around with this weird rumpless shape, and grew these wacky tufted beards from their cheeks. When those qualities were bred together, the Araucana chicken breed was born.
The Araucana was later brought to the US and Europe, but Americans couldn’t handle the bird’s looks. Without tail feathers, it looked too much like the shape you’d expect at the dinner table. They immediately bred the tail feathers back in, also fixing the pathetically low hatch rates that plagued the breed, losing some of the vivid sky-blue eggshell in the process, and creating what is now known as the Americauna breed.