EASTER may be fast approaching and chocolate treats are already in the shops, but forget the chocolate version as a North York Moors couple has found a real mini egg.

Jarvis and Dorothy Browning were given a cracking surprise when they discovered one of their 26 bantams had laid a miniscule egg, no bigger than a ten pence piece weighing in at only half-a-gram.

Mr Browning said the bird, one of his white docks, has never laid an egg that small.

He said: “We were really quite surprised, we have never had any as small as that.

“It really is tiny, but it is the most perfectly-formed egg.”

The couple, who live in Fadmoor, started keeping bantams five years ago and said that normally the eggs laid by the birds are about half the size of a regular hen’s egg.

Poultry breeders say miniature eggs can be caused by a small foreign object entering a bird's oviduct can trigger a normal egg, but with no yolk, being formed, are about quarter of the size of a normal egg.

They say after the miniature egg has been laid normal egg laying resumes.