How can a hen sit on an egg without scrambling it?
Dear Cecil:
My question is simple: how can a mother hen, which must weigh around five pounds or more, sit on a fragile item like an egg without crushing it to pieces?
Dear Rick:
Mama hens don't crush their chilluns mainly because they're not exactly sitting on them, at least not in the sense that humans sit. They're more or less squatting; their feet continue to bear most of the weight. Nesting material also supplies a certain amount of support.
We're used to thinking of chickens as blimplike creatures from seeing the bloated carcasses on sale in the supermarket, but in reality a nesting hen isn't quite so corpulent. Its underside isn't rounded so much as V-shaped, the point of the V being the chicken's breastbone. In addition, the area around the breastbone is devoid of feathers. Together these two features provide a pair of shallow troughlike areas that permit the hen to apply maximum warmth to the eggs without making an omelet out of them. Not that the average hen in a commercial chicken farm has to worry about such things — her eggs are whisked away immediately for processing and packaging.
