No yolking around

Is it possible to hatch a supermarket egg? As a British teenager recently proved, the answer is an unsettling yes.

William Atkins, 14, armed with a $70-incubator he bought on eBay, successfully hatched a free-range duck egg from supermarket chain Waitrose, The Guardian reports. He named the duckling Jeremy. Atkins first attempted the feat with quail eggs, to no avail. “So I thought I would try hens’ eggs and ducks’ eggs, buying half a dozen each,” Atkins told the Daily Mail. After three days of candling (using a bright light to study the development of an embryo), he spotted a beating heart inside one of the duck eggs, followed by some rocking several weeks later, and finally, 28 days after the eggs hit the incubator, Jeremy hatched.

Atkins told the Independent that he was “over the moon when it finally pecked its way out.” Adding: “I love anything to do with wildlife so no one took much notice when I started incubating the egg. They were stunned that I hatched one though — especially mum, who is not sure about me keeping a duckling in my bedroom.” When Jeremy is grown, the family apparently plans to donate him to an area farm.

Rest assured, “You are not going to open a box of eggs, crack them and a chick will fall out,” Mark Diacono, author of The Chicken & Eggs River Cottage Handbook, told The Guardian. Typically, supermarket eggs (of any variety) are unfertilized and thus can’t hatch. Fertilized eggs, if exposed to the right conditions, can indeed hatch. However, a spokesperson for Clarence Court, which produces the duck eggs, told the Independent that without incubation, fertilized eggs “would be totally indistinguishable from unfertilized eggs” and are “harmless to eat.”

Flocks of laying hens are, by nature, exclusively female. “The separation of males from females relies wholly upon the skill of very few qualified people. Inevitably, the odd sexing error is made,” the spokesperson added. “Our ducks are kept in small flocks with access to the outdoors. In this open-air environment, while it is infrequent, our ducks may attract the attention of wild drakes. So, while it is very unusual for males and females to come into contact with one another, it is not impossible.”

In Canada, eggs are refrigerated during transport and in stores, but cold temperatures don’t preclude hatching from happening in the correct environment. According to National Geographic, while refrigeration won’t kill the embryo, it will stop it from growing: “In fact, poultry breeders will sometimes refrigerate fertilized eggs as they collect them so they can start a large batch in the incubator all at the same time.”

While the likelihood of hatching a chick from a supermarket egg is “remarkably slim,” Jeremy and a peep of other high-profile hatchlings have beaten the odds. Other members of this exclusive club include: Oaky, the rare Oakham Blue chick, which hatched in 2004 from a half-dozen box of Tesco’s eggs; Albert the quail chick, which hatched in 2016 in the Netherlands after Alwyn Wils placed a dozen eggs in an incubator “out of curiosity”; and Coop Olle, a chick hatched from a six-pack of eggs north of Stockholm, Sweden in 2017.