Rain water has been ingressing the Egg for some time and has been the active agent in creating the work on canvas ‘Stained Sun Shield’ (above), representing seven showers passing through the western red cedar shell during August. The source of the drips (Main Leak) was today the first focus for a week of remedial attention designed to weather proof the Egg for the challenges of WInter to come.
Egg Builder Paul Baker inspecting the exterior shell prior to treatment.
Production will begin shortly of a limited edition of six bottles of Vin de Mûres, made from specially selected blackberries ripened on west facing bushes along The Gateway to the Egg. The fruits have been hand picked and the fermentation process is imminent for this new wine, from La Maison d’Oeuf.
Striped arial raiders have dug out a former mouse hole as a home and I am keeping my distance as they come and go. The wasp’s sting evolved from an ovipositor and so only the females will send you off in need of vinegar, but then one is not likely ever to meet the male.
A fluorescing tube in the ultra violet spectrum was employed to turn the egg into a huge moth attracting device last night. White cotton gauze stretched across the doorway was intended as the stage for a flickering theatre of moths in flight and a platform on which they could land for solo performances in both silhouette and spotlight.
The grey or dark dagger below (it is only possible to tell them apart by an examination of genitalia) was a memorable participant. In the caterpillar state they love blackthorn, so the nearby thicket is perhaps its own home and the axis of it’s nocturnal world.
Around one hundred and fifty Canada geese arrived yesterday in the early evening, appearing from the direction of the Isle of Wight. They were letting everything and everyone know they were coming with that raucous, noisy honking that ripples too and fro throughout the flying flock. Two small resident groups already here, frequent a pond on farmland adjoining Exbury Gardens and it is beginning to feel like the start of a Canada goose convention. I watched a pair of shell (shocked) ducks seemingly retreating out of their way.
These naturalised Canadians first settled in England in the 17th Century when they were introduced as attractions in the gardens of country estates and perhaps our local flocks still have some distant race memory of ornamental forebears on the Exbury Estate? I shall have to ask if any were ever kept hereabouts.
The sun set toward Beaulieu in beguiling fashion yesterday evening as I recorded the event to test the GoPro camera’s capacity for time lapse photography from a bright to no light situation. I will need use a different camera to shoot the night sky. The sun goes down every day in greater or lesser glory, but what is really happening in the air it shines through and on land and water here in my parish below?
Though I try to be hand in glove with nature, I’d not necessarily like to put my hand in this glove. The tide line this morning was littered with different items of human detritus which I tagged with date and geo-location. Over the course of the year I will record their movements around my personal little parish. Should anyone find a Beaulieu Beadle (BB) item further afield, please do advise me of its position prior to safe disposal.
Empty molted shells of hundreds of crabs are washed up on the high tide line beside the Egg and I am starting a collection of these exoskeletons from the size of a penny to the full size of my hand. A crab might molt 20 times in its life and I’d like to find an equivalent number of spent shells of increasing size to tell something of this remarkable process.
There must be scores of places to read about this online, but I referred to this link http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/Kodiak/shellfish/cultivation/crabGrow.htm
The large circular window adopts different egg like form depending upon point of view. It was well polished by Wendy the architect prior to delivery here, where I anticipate a great many more intriguing and original screenings.
An imperious moon is rising in an uncontested night time sky, but continually redrawn by an incoming tide, rising with gravity to its invitation.
The Exbury Egg 