egg-bound

Her eye for physical detail is surprising, gimlet: two brown eggs “one fair like milk tea, the other dark and a bit orange”; the way children move and pout and swoon around animals; an egg-bound hen “with a great wag in her posterior.”

This is not the first evidence of such prenatal communication in birds; egg-bound embryos in some species, for example, can learn particular calls from their parents.

Young hens are often affected by becoming egg-bound; that is; they are unable to force the passage of the egg from the ovary to the nest.

If she is egg-bound, the egg can be felt.

Egg-bound.—Probably an inland word; but it was only from one of the beach I heard it.