What is a blue egg? Why is it blue? Where did it come from? Blue eggs exist without the use of artificial dye?
These are questions that can be answered by the Ameraucana chicken.
Blue chicken eggs are nutritionally no different from any other chicken egg. The color is merely a thin outer layer, and comes from biliverdin which is a component of hemoglobin, found in blood. Araucanas (a South American breed) and Ameraucanas (an American breed) are the only two true chicken breeds that reliably lay blue eggs.
Araucanas are rather unusual-looking chickens. They have a puff of feathers under their beaks, called a beard, and yet more fluffy feathers on the sides of their faces, called a muff.
They also lack a tail, a trait that is linked to a lethal gene that causes approximately twenty-five percent of Araucana chicks to die a few days before they hatch.
Ameraucana chickens came about in an attempt to create a bird that lays blue eggs without the lethal gene found in Araucanas. The result is a mild-mannered and medium-sized bird with a muff and/or beard that lays blue eggs. Because they lack the lethal gene, they do have tails.
There are other chickens that lay eggs that are not brown or white, called Easter eggers.
These birds are always Araucanas or Ameraucanas crossed with other breeds, and lay eggs ranging in color from a pinkish brown to a neutral green.
So there you have it: an abridged explanation of blue chicken eggs and the birds that lay them.