the case of the mysterious missing egg

Yesterday I checked the chicken coop in the late morning and there was one egg.  Said egg was being sat on by gentle Pearl, our Buff Orpington, so I decided to let her be and collect it (with hopefully at least one more) later on.  So imagine my surprise when, upon my return hours later, I lifted the door and saw not one, not two, but zero eggs!  Hmmm.  Confused, I recalled the morning and tried to remember myself collecting the egg... but since that never happened, I just couldn't remember doing it.  I even called Mike at work to verify the number of eggs in the carton that morning.  Three.  Yep, still just three in there.  So where (oh where?) did that egg go?  Did a snake get it?  We've seen some snakes in our yard, but none lately.  Did one of the hens eat it?  I've heard you have to be careful of that, and perhaps that would explain the previous two eggs that we've found with a small little hole in the shell. (from pecking, perhaps?)  But honestly, I was and am clueless.  Lesson learned?  When I see an egg, collect the egg.  Okay.  Easy enough.

We've gotten a little lazy about closing the coop door at night, which sounds terrible, I know.  But our reasoning has been that despite our efforts to encourage and coax him in, Wolfie is predominantly an outdoor dog and with his (still very high level of) interest in the hens, we weren't too worried about anything getting in to bother them.  But last night, just in case, I closed it.

This morning around 8am Mike came home, let the hens out, and collected 2 eggs.  Typically, they've been mid to late morning layers, somewhere around 10am or so.  I'm thinking maybe they got bored sitting around inside and figured since they had nothing better to do, they might as well just go lay some eggs.  Another lesson learned: closing the coop door at night possibly gets them to get down to the business of laying earlier in the day, so we can easily collect the eggs first thing.  None of this disappearing egg nonsense.  I hope.

But where did that egg go?