Photo by Sue Weaver Carl the Buckeye cockerel gave us the news of Camilla’s first egg. |
This morning, there was a huge commotion over by the chicken coop. Uzzi and I wondered what was going on? Just then, Carl the cockerel strutted by with one of his hens. We asked him, and he said, “Camilla laid an egg.” Uzzi and I looked at each other. The way she was carrying on, you’d think she laid a basketball.
Our Buckeye chickens are almost 6 months old and the pullets have been laying for over a month. Mom is excited when she comes back from the coop with a handful of eggs. “What’s the big deal?” we thought, so we decided to learn all we could about chicken eggs. Here are some of the strange things we found:
- Did you know that Howard Helmer, Senior National Representative for the American Egg Board, Helmer holds three Guinness World Records for omelet-making? He’s world’s fastest omelet maker (427 omelets in 30 minutes); he made world’s fastest single omelet (42 seconds from whole egg to omelet); and he’s the world omelet flipping champion (30 flips in 34 seconds).
- On Oct. 11, 2010, Yum-Bir (the Turkish Egg Producers Association) and Pruva Neta tourist agency celebrated World Egg Day by frying an world record omelet weighing 9,702 pounds and 8 ounces), using a 114 gallons of oil and 110,010 eggs. Who ate it? We don’t know!
- World’s largest egg, already accepted by the World Records Academy and pending acceptance by the Guinness Book of World Records, was laid by a hen belonging to Zhang Yinde of Heilongjiang Province, China. The egg was 2.5 inches wide by 3.6 inches long and weighed 7.09 ounces. Now that hen had something to cackle about.
- The Guinness world record for the number of persons participating in an egg toss was set on July 4, 2008, in Skagway Ala., with 1,422 people tossing eggs to and fro.
- On Nov. 12, 1978 at Jewett, Texas, Johnny Dell Foley tossed a raw egg for a distance of 323 feet 2 inches to Keith Thomas, who caught it unbroken.
- In March 2009, Zachery George of West Virginia broke the old Guinness record for egg holding by holding 24 eggs in his right hand.
- Ashrita Furman balanced 888 eggs, all by herself, at York College in New York on June 12, 2010. On July 20, 2010, she set another Guinness record by eating three pickled eggs in 58.16 seconds.
- I bet you think that’s bizarre, but think about this: Steve Starr of the United Kingdom achieved a Guinness record on March 16, 2011, when he swallowed and regurgitated 11 boiled eggs in one minute on the set of Lo Show Dei Record, in Milan, Italy. Now that is really weird!
