How to Get Speckling to Show Up on Eggs

You’ve waited years and invested a lot of money to add Speckled Layers to your flock. So why are some of their eggs being laid with hardly any speckles at all? I’ll share my tips and tricks for nourishing the girl’s bodies to hopefully help them resume laying those incredible speckles! Here is how to get speckling to show up on eggs a bit better in hens carrying known speckling genes:

How to Get Speckling to Show Up on Eggs:

Speckled Genes Are Required

Speckles on chicken eggs are caused by a slower rotation of the egg in the shell gland. This makes the protoporphyrin (pigment) adhere to the shell in splotches as the glands secrete it, instead of being spread evenly across the egg as it rotates. It is known to be specific to certain breeds and can be deliberately bred for so individual birds inherit this slow-egg-turning genetic trait. (It is believed this trait is best or most strongly inherited from the father.)

How to Get Increased Speckling to Show Up on Eggs

The feeding experiment I describe below did NOT work on hens who lay plain, non-speckled, smooth eggs. In order to have speckling show up, the hen must be carrying speckling genes, which is evidenced by her ability to lay most of her eggs with speckles. As of this writing in 2022, hatcheries are not offering speckled olive egger chicks. Unique speckled layers must come from breeders who are using roosters and/or hens known to be carrying speckled egg genes.

Obligatory Dietary Warning:

As with all dietary suggestions, it is up to you to decide what is best for your flock. What is listed below is my personal experience with feeding certain foods as treats and offering poultry mineral supplements to my hens beyond what is found in common commercial chicken feed. It is presented with pictures as anecdotal evidence that diet may have influenced the eggs laid. Formal scientific research in the area of chicken egg shell speckling related to diet is lacking but I provided links to research evidence of certain minerals influencing overall egg shell coloring where I found it.

Time of Year Matters

If it is the middle of summer with sizzling temperatures, the feeding suggestions given below will not be of much help. Your hen’s bodies are under heat-related stress, which has a tendency to lighten egg shells, diminish speckling and reduce laying. Increasing your flock’s water intake is the absolute best step you can take. Offering cool water sweetened with 1 teaspoon of molasses per quart and a few drops of Poultry NutriDrench will encourage the hens to drink readily. (Affiliate link.) Save some of the tips below for fall or spring when their bodies are not under heat stress. Cold water, refreshed a couple times per day, and providing ample shade and air flow is the best step if you are looking for better colored eggs in the heat. The pictures on this page all have the months listed in which the eggs were laid and most were taken in January, not summertime.

Increase Those Speckles!

Chick season is coming and everyone wants their girls laying jaw-dropping shades that drive hatching egg and chick sales. While diet cannot replace good quality breeding, there are a few things you can do to help your girls be in robust, tip-top nutritional shape so they lay their best possible eggs. In December 2021 I noticed the speckled olive egger hens I had bred from good speckled gene stock were not laying eggs as nicely speckled as their first pullet eggs. I wondered why? The personal feeding experiment I ran began in January 2022 when young hens are often at their peak as they begin or resume laying.

The Theory I Tested: Good Nutrition In = Pretty Eggs Out?

Speckled layers very often lay eggs with brown or green speckling over the top of a base shell color. I had read that “Shell pigments may also be produced from red blood cells within the [hen’s] uterus” in this paper on page 4. This made sense because my Welsummers laid eggs with speckling that almost looked blood-and-iron red. I instantly wondered if feeding my hens an iron-rich food could boost the process by which some speckling is produced?

My Feeding Experiment Began January 1

To test my theory that iron might influence speckling, I opted to use some free venison meat trimmings I had. I diced the venison pieces small and fed it raw to my girls as a mid-day treat, after they had eaten their morning feed. Hens are greedy eaters but there was enough that each hen received a minimum of 1 teaspoon and up to 1 Tablespoon of raw venison. I fed the venison once and over the next few days noticed speckling increased a little. When I fed the venison twice in one week, 72 hours apart, I noticed a marked increase in speckling. As you can imagine, the hens who laid plain blue or green eggs continued to lay plain blue or green without any difference in shell appearance because they do not carry speckling genes.

Is Iron the Magic Mineral?

After doing the venison feeding experiment above, I read an online article that stated: “The brown [shell] colour is from a pigment that is laid down on the egg, it’s called protoporphyrin IX, which is like the haem group in haemoglobin in your blood. But the haemoglobin in your blood has iron in it which is why you get the red colour; on the eggshell there’s no iron which is why you get the brown colour.”

So it turns out there may not be iron in the pigmented deposits on the egg shell and feeding iron-rich foods doesn’t directly influence speckling. But does iron indirectly help speckling? Or is it all a coincidence and everyone laid more speckled eggs at the same time just because?

But Mites that Cause Anemia Can Effect Shell Color!

Hens that are under parasite stress are not in peak laying condition. Mites that feed on the hen’s blood can lead to anemia (iron levels that are too low), which commercial producers know causes loss of shell color (tint) in brown laying breeds. But what about speckling? Here we are back to the question of whether a bird’s overall iron level is somehow effecting shell speckling or not.

Maybe it’s a different Mineral?

Perhaps it was not iron but another mineral that contributed to speckling? I tried a second experiment where I gave the hens a quart of water sweetened with 1 teaspoon of molasses and added 10 drops of poultry NutriDrench (Affiliate link). Would an overall boost in vitamins and minerals perhaps help more speckling to appear on the shell? Molasses does contain some iron as well as manganese, calcium, magnesium, copper, vitamin B-6, selenium, potassium and a small amount of zinc. Poultry NutriDrench is loaded with vitamins and minerals and is partially derived from molasses products. (It also contains some added iron.) The NutriDrench homepage brags “Nutridrench® does not require digestion and absorbs into the bloodstream in minutes. The speed is comparable to injection with a hypodermic needle.” So what happened when I gave the molasses + NutriDrench water to the speckled olive egger adults for a couple days? Speckling continued to appear on the shells!

Minerals for the Win

As I was writing this article, I stumbled across research completed by Zinpro, who offers high quality mineral supplements to commercial poultry producers. Their study compared how zinc, manganese, copper and iron supplementation in laying hens compared to hens fed a standard commercial feed diet. The hens who enjoyed the mineral supplements laid more eggs with less breakage, which hints at better quality shells. But what about egg color and speckling? That info was not provided on the report but the combination of the four minerals mentioned was interesting. It turns out venison has the highest levels of iron of all meats and is a very good source of zinc, with venison also providing some copper and manganese. Zinc, manganese, iron and copper: the very same minerals Zinpro researched. Those four minerals are also found together in Poultry NutriDrench!

My Personal Conclusion

I felt lucky that the free venison I had access to happened to be a good source of the minerals speckled layers may need to produce shell speckling at their fullest genetic potential. But NutriDrench is so much easier to administer! And it is probably a less “objectionable” supplement for keepers to use, even if people forget that chickens are omnivore cousins to hawks and vultures; wild birds who subsist on nothing but raw meat every day. My hens all thrived after eating clean, raw venison and would greedily rip pieces out of their flockmate’s beaks to get more. However, long-term, high-protein diets are known to cause egg binding in hens so I prefer to keep the venison at treat-levels during the cooler months and use NutriDrench more regularly.

Dosage will Vary – Your Experimentation is Required

When I administered NutriDrench to my flock I offered 1 quart of water with 10 drops of NutriDrench and 1 teaspoon of Grandma’s brand unsulphered molasses, mixed together in a quart mason jar (Affiliate links). The molasses is there to encourage the birds to drink and give some additional vitamins and minerals because the hens did not seem to like the NutriDrench by itself. I had okay results when using 10 drops of NutriDrench BUT my hens had also been consuming venison pieces twice weekly and speckling was already on the rise. You may need to experiment with NutriDrench doses to find how many drops or ounces helps nourish your speckled layers.

Other Things That May Impact Speckling & Shell Color:

Here is a quick run-down of additional things I found online that can impact shell color, which have the potential to influence speckling as well:

Avoiding the Coccidiostat Nicarbazin

The coccidiostat Nicarbazin in some medicated poultry feeds is known to lighten egg shells or produce paler colored egg shells. If you have been consistently disappointed by the colors your birds lay and regularly give medicated feed, this feed ingredient may be to blame.

Avoid Table Salt from Kitchen Scraps

Commercial Producers are aware that too much salt (NaCl) in a hen’s diet can be detrimental to egg shell color and quality. If your hens get leftover scraps such as french fries, salted crackers, or potato chips, the excess salt may be to blame for shell issues you might be experiencing.

Using a Dewormer to Increase Egg Quality

Hens under parasite stress will not lay their best eggs. Using a liquid dewormer in the flock’s water for 5 days is a quick way to improve egg cleanliness. (You can read more here about how to do this.) It is the experience of myself and other keepers that healthy, nourished hens simply lay better eggs. And “better” eggs often includes richly colored eggs.

Free Ranging, Especially in Wooded Areas

It should not surprise you that bugs – like crickets, grubs and spiders – are rich in calcium, iron, zinc, manganese, and copper. Hens are most likely to find these in abundance in wooded areas where fallen branches and leaf litter have created an insect paradise. You may see an oomph in speckling appear 24-48 hours after the hens have had access to a particularly buggy or untouched section of brushy woods. You could mimic this type of feeding by offering live meal worms or feeder crickets to your flock.

Fats Believed to Improve Blue Egg Deposits

If your hens are carrying a blue egg gene and you’re hoping for richer blue, green and olive tones, many keepers believe that sightly increasing fat intake can have some influence on the biliverdin pigment in the shell gland that creates a blue deposit on eggshells. “The hypothesis [is] that the avian shell gland is most likely to be the site of biosynthesis and secretion of both eggshell porphyrins and biliverdin.” Many a chicken keeper has noticed that when good quality fats such as black oil sunflower seeds or human food grade fats, such as beef trimmings, are given, the hens lay eggs that appear a little bluer. This nutritional understanding can help you select scratch or treats that may benefit egg color.

What if Nothing is Working?

If you have a hen whom you have seen lay speckled eggs before but none of these tips are working, there is usually a simple reason: she’s not a true-bred speckled layer. I have had some green and peach laying Easter Egger hens who, every fall, suddenly begin laying eggs with a smattering of very pretty speckles. But the speckles only seem to appear in the autumn, right as the summer heat begins to abate. The reason for this seems to be the reason for all speckles appearing: the egg turns more slowly inside the shell gland. It can sometimes correspond with a slow down in laying where a hen’s egg production drops but each egg laid is just prettier.

Mother-Inherited Speckling Is Often Weaker

Some of my Whiting x Welsummer olive egger hens who only inherited speckling from their mother will lay eggs that are lightly speckled. It is believed that heavy speckling is best inherited from the father, so breeding for very reliable speckled layers takes a lot of time, trial and error as you experiment with roosters who hatch from various speckled eggs. (This is why Speckled Olive Egger hatching eggs can be $70+ per dozen.) The only solution may be to add good quality chicks from a local breeder with a stunning speckled layer breeding project.

Breeding Tip:

If you are looking for the absolute heaviest speckling in the shortest number of years of breeding (yes, years – remember why speckled layer chicks are expensive) then cross very heavily speckled Marans or Dark Cocoa Speckled F4-F8 Olive Egger hatch mates together for 1 or 2 generations until the hens are laying very heavily speckled dark brown eggs. You must save their brothers and then use these heavy speckled gene roos over homozygous blue laying hens to produce green shells with the heaviest brown speckling possible. Back cross the offspring to the fathers to keep the speckling strong. Using 6 or more homozygous blue layer hens to produce the F1 Speckled Olive Egger offspring will help refresh the genetics so back crossing or inbreeding does not become an issue. The first step of breeding hatch mates from a heavily speckled brown egg line to each other as a way to “set” the heaviest speckling possible should not be skipped.

Note: There seems to be evidence that Marans from heavily speckled lines tend to produce darker, more visible speckling generation after generation than Welsummers do.

Please Share Your Tips!

Chicken keepers are searching for breeding and feeding tips on how to get stronger speckling to show up on their eggs. Let’s help each other learn by sharing what you have tried or experienced in the comments below!

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