Thank you to everyone for wishes of wellness after yesterday’s accident. Today the river made its feelings known too.
Author Archives for Eggman
Stumbling about in the dark
I stumbled out of bed at one am yesterday to view the moon. After a sudden lurch of the Egg to starboard I reached out in the dark to steady myself and crunched into a large vitrine of ethanol and preserved rose hips. Destroying the jar gave me quite a sting, which was sorted later when my neighbour Nick kindly drove me to hospital in Lymington. After six stitches, the nurse was pleased that he could now claim to have ‘sutured the Eggman’.
Wood Pecking
There are a few great spotted woodpeckers at work in the vicinity of the Egg. They seek out suitable hollowed trees to use as sound posts to mark out their territory. My own efforts are at about half speed and a bit low in tone to pose much of a threat to the locals.
Egg of Life
There have been many attempts to visualise a system of the animals which in the nineteenth century tended to depict a ‘Great Chain of Being’ with people perched at the top of a tree of life. Zoologist Georg Goldfuss in showing stages of development within the animal kingdom, characterises this idea as a series of interconnected nested circles within an egg; with protozoa at the point of the widest end and ‘higher life’ at the peak of the narrowest. Transferring his diagram to the Exbury Egg, I see that I nest myself somewhere in the zone of the mollusc.
I fell asleep last night considering life as a cuttlefish and contemplating the idea that every single creature is equally evolved and important to our understanding of the interconnection of species.
- System of the Animals, Georg August Goldfuss. Ueber die entwicklungsstufen des thieres, Nurnberg 1817
Chinese Translucent White
This large Chinese translucent white was found yesterday in a mud pool at 50-47-07.69N x 1-24-27.62W, left behind by the tide. It is thought to have first entered the country in large shipping containers and spread quickly throughout most of England. This specimen is not in the best condition and the upper wings have lost most of their multicoloured glittery scales, but its life expectancy runs to many scores of years in the wild unless captured and recycled.
An overwintering red admiral and a brimstone were spotted this morning but proved more difficult to capture on film.
Candelabrum
A cedar of Lebanon in Exbury Gardens gifted me the branch I needed for a ‘Christmas tree’ and has now laid a candelabrum at my feet. On a walk yesterday morning I found this weathered branch whose six eroded cones have become the spikes required to attach candles to illuminate the Egg.
Venus & Luna
The crescent of a waning moon reached out to Venus with open arms this morning, lit bright in light from a sun still lingering below the horizon and reflected in the calm water of a falling tide. The ‘two-horned queen of the stars’* embracing love, fertility and prosperity above an expectant Egg.
* In the Carmen Saeculare, performed in 17 BC, Horace invokes Luna as the “two-horned queen of the stars” (siderum regina bicornis). Ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_(goddess)
Fallen Angel
Boris
My friend Boris is a young Norfolk Terrier who lives with neighbours Nick and Caroline and he has been a regular visitor to the Egg since attending its arrival at Exbury early in May last year. Late one night in November I discovered him via the webcam, guarding washing which I had forgotten to bring in. The Egg and its environs are clearly part of Boris’s world too.
- Visitors chancing by the Egg last summer were always given a warm welcome by Boris, who sometimes swam out to greet them.
Marble Galls
I spent all morning studying Andricus Kollari, the tiny parasitic wasp whose eggs cause the marble oak galls on both scrubby oaks growing beside my own Egg. The life cycle of the wasp requires the presence of a Turkey oak which first grew in the UK before the last glacial period around 110,000 years ago and was reintroduced in 1735 as an ornamental tree. Nearby Exbury Gardens has its own mature examples.
‘The developing spherical galls mature in August and each has a central chamber, with a single female wasp larva of an asexual generation, which emerges through a ‘woodworm-like’ hole as an adult winged gall-wasp in September. These asexual females lay unfertilized eggs in the embryonic bud leaves of the Turkey oak, with galls slowly developing during winter, and visible in March and April as small oval structures between the bud scales, looking like ant’s eggs. The emerging adult gall-wasps in spring are the sexual generation, producing both males and females, which fly to the common oaks to initiate the formation of the summer marble gall.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andricus_kollari
By 1830 the galls were a concern in the new Forest, where it was thought that they reduced acorn production sufficiently to have an adverse effect on Pannage* This year there was a huge crop of both galls and acorns. Beadle drawings use ink made from the galls. *ref. my blog of January 22nd.
The Gall is more often seen than its wasp, which is just 1.5 – 2mm in length.
The Exbury Egg 