How to Tell if Your Chicken Egg is Fertile

You will have to sacrifice at least one potentially fertile egg for this experiment. But, the payoff is you will know that your rooster is doing his rooster thing (do rooster lay eggs?) properly and your eggs should produce chicks.

The best way to tell is to crack the egg open and look for a "bullseye".   The bullseye is actually called a blastoderm.

Even an unfertilized egg will have a white spot in it (which is actually a blastodisc).  In the unfertilized egg, the white area is more of an irregular shaped area whereas in the fertilized egg it is a more circular defined area with a bullseye around it.

When we brought in our first Orpington egg and we eagerly cracked it open into a bowl.

We couldn't see anything at first in the yolk, so we had to carefully turn the yolk over with a spoon.  Luckily, we did find a bullseye!

If you look closely at the yolk above (toward the middle right) you can see a light bullseye.  (It is difficult to get a good picture).

This technique is standard across all of your chickens, no matter if they are Frizzle chickens, Silkie chickens, Bantam chickens, or anything else.

Next step is incubating and then hatching!

After you know your chicken eggs are fertilize, you can spend the next few days collecting eggs and then set them in an incubator (We recommend the Brinsea Eco 20 or the GQF Digital Sportsman Cabinet Incubator 1502).