The other day, Holly Brown was out in her backyard in Canada, where her seven chickens forage and graze, when something unusual caught her eye.

There, nestled in the grass near the chickens’ coop, was a white, round object she’d never seen before.

“At first, I thought it was a ball the dog found,” Brown said in an email to The Dodo. “When I picked it up I realized, to my surprise, it was an egg.” © Holly Brown Evidently, that day, one of Brown’s hens had departed from producing a typical egg-shaped egg, laying a nearly perfectly round egg instead.

It was unlike anything Brown had ever seen.

Here's the egg next to a ping pong ball: © Holly Brown Brown decided to post about the odd egg on social media. That’s how she discovered just how special that gift from her chicken really was.

A friend of Brown’s cited another story of a woman who found a round egg, and later sold it for hundreds of dollars.

Reports at the time referred to the odds of finding a round egg as “one in a billion” — not an official figure, of course, but likely a safe indicator of round eggs' rarity. © Holly Brown Brown, meanwhile, said she has no plans to part with her prized round egg. She’s going to keep it as a conversation piece — as a special gift from her cherished birds.

After all, to Brown, her hens are more than just egg-layers (round or otherwise). © Holly Brown “I regard [my chickens] as pets,” Brown said. “Watching their antics every day is entertaining."