Oh, hey, it's still your neighbor's daughter who approves of your mustache, Alie Ward, and we're back with Part 2 of Chickens.

Are you ready for this? Okay, so this guest who we met in the fabulous Part 1 this week wrote the new book under the

hen influence and we had so many questions. We had just split this between two installments. So welcome to Part 2.

But before we get into it, thank you to everyone at patreon.com slash allergies for supporting the show for a buck or more a month and submitting questions for this.

Thanks everyone who tells a friend about the show and who subscribes and race and leaves me reviews like a little treasure, including these farm fresh ones.

One from Christie who wrote Imagine My Shock while driving in my parents home in Fitzgerald, Georgia, and hearing the name of my hometown out of the blue.

Yes, the occasional rooster makes its way to my parents home. They're large and charge and absolutely beautiful said Christie in their review.

Let's wrap up this chicken two-parter cuddle up in the coop and listen to a squawk about fairy eggs, dark yolks, relaxing clocks, pecking orders, beak accessories, spicy rats, awkward molting, chicken on chicken crime, pet chickens, and coop advice and more.

With hen mom, chicken researcher, journalist, and author of Under the Hen Fluence, inside the world of backyard chickens and the people who love them, chickenologist, toba danavitch.

I have so many questions from listeners. Can I just lob them at you? Please. My list Robertson first time question asker says I have friends who insist that brown eggs are healthier than white.

And it means that the chicken was raised naturally and my list says I think it's because of the breed of chicken who's right.

They are right. It's the breed of the chicken. That said, the brown egg layers do tend to have a slightly higher feed conversion ratio.

So they need a little bit more food to lay those eggs. The white egg layers have smaller bodies. So white eggs will tend to be the cheapest egg still because of that.

So yes, brown eggs are more expensive to produce in terms of feed. And for all the patrons who asked about egg color looking at you, Mira Simitov, Wilk Hengen, Elina Kruzen, Dunea Khan, Anna Euston, Erin Napp, Alyssa Elliott, Zoe D, Shoshana Bell, Elizabeth Weiss, Shannon Feltis,

and Paul Smith who wrote in, talked to me about blue eggs, please. So yes, there are many breeds and hybrids of chicken. And each chicken makes her own egg color, which doesn't change from one color to the next ever.

It's like, this is my color, but different breeds of chickens tend to have their own color tendencies. And there are even chickens called Easter Eggers that produce pink and dark brown and seaglass blue.

They're chickens that make modeled Java colored eggs and olive speckled treasures. I mean, olive ones and blue eggs.

I will say if you get eggs that are like blue or green, those chickens are really inefficient. And probably a farm is not going to have those if they're going for like high volume egg output.

So I always think that's kind of a nice little nod to what kind of conditions the flock was maybe raised in or like the ethos of the chicken keeper.

If you have rainbow eggs because they're just like very impractical.

I had no idea, but they're beautiful for the person that harvests them.

Yeah, they're delightful. I love them. We like pick out, you know, which eggs will I have today for my breakfast? So it feels special.

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