The red of the sea beet is in a fight for light with surrounding grasses and the pale yellow of the more plentiful sea purslane is an easily dismissed fuzz of brownish yellow. Relatively dull to the naked eye, they have a haunting and memorable presence under my microscope’s lens.
Damselfly are flitting from leaf to leaf beside the water on my parish border with the adjacent Exbury Gardens. They briefly land all facing the same way and long enough sometimes for a photograph.
Many caterpillars of the small tortoiseshell butterfly were feasting on a nettle and leaving tracks of their own black droppings of processed green leaf. Another much smaller critter of similar colour, was only noticed when I examined the photos on screen.
Empty egg cases of the common whelk are fairly frequent spongy finds amongst the detritus of the tide line beside my own Egg. The adult whelk is less evident, though I found the shell of the five year old below (if every spiral marks a year), not far from the type of sac it would have spawned from. Both are now part of a growing collection inside the Egg that helps to relate the life and times of my riverine parish.
The Exbury Egg 