Egg-eating hen!!!

Chickens eat chicken eggs!  I'm sure this happens in nature, and on factory farms, but not so fun if you are keeping chickens for eggs.  Can't tell from this camera angle if she is eating her own egg or the egg from a different chicken.  Asides from the loss of eggs, this creates a mess and can be unsanitary.  You can see this hen dripping yolk everywhere.

     So what steps should you take if your hens are eating eggs.  First you have to notice.  In this video you see the hen removing the egg entirely from the nest box.  If I hadn't seen the video I don't know if I would have known that an egg was missing.  They aren't always this stealthy though.  Sometimes you will see an unfinished egg.  More often there will be egg whites and yolk all over the other eggs.
     Ideally, you want to identify exactly which hen is eating eggs.  This isn't easy because it requires direct observation over a period of hours.  For example, this video was from 11 a.m.  We first tried "roll away" nest boxes which are designed for the eggs to roll into a compartment where the hens can't reach the eggs.  These specialty boxes are expensive and there is NO guarantee that your hens will actually use them.  In fact our hens totally ignore them and lay elsewhere.
     Then I set up a video camera.  I used a Cloud Cam, but I can't say that I would recommend it right now because Amazon makes it unnecessarily difficult to review clips.  Other cameras will save video to a SD card which you can more easily view.  This isn't an option for the Cloud Cam.  You will also notice from the clip it begins "in media res".  The camera literally recorded nothing for the proceeding half-hour that the chicken was sitting there in the nest box.