How do chickens lay eggs without a rooster?

Let's be honest - keeping backyard chickens is no cheap endeavor. But it does help reduce kitchen waste, allows you to raise your own food, and is super rewarding. But how do chickens lay eggs without a rooster?

As new chicken owners, we've taken extra good care of our backyard flock. From raising them as baby chicks, building them a super-fly chicken coop, to providing them with a run with some shade to have a cool place to hang in the hot summer, they are definitely happy chickens. (And expensive ones!) 

A healthy hen that is well-fed and taken care of can produce up to 250 eggs in it's lifetime! That's over 20 dozen eggs. Right now on a good day, eggs cost $6/dozen. That's $120 on eggs, from just one chicken. I figure I have 7 hens, so our chickens will save us close to $900 on eggs over the next couple of years. 

They're still young hens, and we just started getting a couple of eggs a day. We ordered zero roosters, but as they grew we discovered we actually had 2 roosters - which was problem. A small flock like ours can only have one rooster - the rule is one rooster per 10 hens. Otherwise, the roosters will fight to the death. Literally.

Our Rhode Island Red turned out to be a rooster, as did one of our Lavender Orpingtons. Having a rooster present can help keep your flock safe, but it also brings the presence of fertilized eggs. 

While I do realize that many people keep chickens as true pets, ours are a source of food for our homestead. The RIR rooster turned out to be mean (like, really mean) and I didn't need to risk him hurting our 7-year old when he went to get eggs. He was fertilizing two of the hens so aggressively that the sides of their necks were completely bare of feathers. 

Here is is approaching her and you can see how tiny she is compared to him and how rough her poor little neck looks.

I know this can be considered normal behavior for roosters. That said, we made the decision to keep the gentler rooster to protect the flock and cull the aggressive one, and I don't regret it. Stepping into the coop is so much less stressful now, and everyone is happy to see you! 

If that's not for you, there are options such as "rooster collars" to protect the hens from the rooster's aggressiveness, but that's not a route we wanted to take. 

Here's our Lavender Orpington hen and our Lavender Orpington rooster. It became pretty obvious pretty quickly that they were not the same.

So, what about those hens he fertilized? Did they lay fertilized eggs? Honestly - I don't know. We've just collected and eaten them all. Yes, you can eat fertile eggs! The commercial eggs you buy from the grocery store are not fertilized, but as long as you haven't incubated the fertilized egg you can eat it just the same as any other eggs and you'll never know the difference. 

Female hen egg production

So how do those chickens lay eggs without a rooster? And why don't they need a rooster? It's a common question, and the egg-laying process is a pretty interesting one!

It's a common misconception that chicken eggs cannot be layed without the presence of a rooster. Egg production in a female chicken happens regardless of the presence of a rooster or not. While the rooster does provide fertilization for chicken eggs, it is not necessary to have a rooster in order to have eggs. 

Female chicks are born with two ovaries, but only the left one will survive into adulthood carrying all the eggs that she’ll ever need. The right ovary atrophies and dies.  

One ovary is more than enough and contains hundreds of egg follicles which will ripen one at a time. 

Chicken eggs get fertilized when a rooster completes the transfer of sperm to a hen through a process called cloacal contact, also known as the cloacal kiss. The rooster lowers his cloaca, and the female inverts her cloaca until they touch. This is called the Cloacal kiss. There's no penetration involved since roosters don't have penises. During the cloacal kiss the hen opens her cloaca so that the rooster's sperm can be passed effectively from his papilla into her oviduct.

Sperm penetrates the egg long before the hard shell is formed, which is how the eggs are already fertilized before they are laid. 

The most interesting thing, to me at least, is that fertilization of an egg can happen within an hour of mating, or, the hen can hold onto the sperm in the reproductive tract, lay unfertilized eggs, and then lay a fertilized egg anywhere from 2-3 weeks after. 

Egg specifics

How many chicken eggs you get will depend on multiple factors, including the number of hours of daylight they're getting. The more daylight hours, the more eggs. Some people will provide the chickens with artificial light to trick them into thinking the days are longer, in order to get more eggs. On our homestead, we try to live as close to nature as possible, and let all creatures (including us!) follow the natural circadian rhythyms of the seasons. 

Specific chicken breeds will also lay more eggs than others. We bought some breeds for their egg laying reliability - for example, Barred Plymouth Rocks will lay around 5 eggs a week (we have 2!),and average around 200-250 a year.

We bought other breeds for variety and to add color to our eggs - our Olive Egger should produce about the same as the BPR in a year, but the Cream Legbar, who lays blue eggs, will lay around 150-200 a year. (That said, she was the first of ours to start laying and has given us a blue egg every day!) 

A white leghorn will lay a whopping 280-330 eggs a year. (We don't have one of these yet, but it's on my list!) 

Different breeds of chicken provide different things, so it just depends on what you're looking for. Regardless, you can have only hens and still get eggs every single day. And there's nothing better than going out for egg collection and finding an egg in a nesting box (or, randomly throughout the run, if you're our chickens. They do what they want.)