At the weekend, Nigel was cultivating our smallish garden and I was inside, writing. Every so often he would stride purposefully past the window carrying a spade or fork.
After 8
months of gardening, particularly intensive due to this year’s special
circumstances, I wondered what could be left to do out there.
Suddenly he
rapped on the glass, making me jump.
‘You’ll
never guess what I’ve found!’
‘Is it a
frog?’ Tetchily. It is usually a frog.
But no,
just by an iris, a complete chicken egg, partially buried.
‘Could it
have been kids egging the house on Halloween?’
No – it was
several feet from the house and not even cracked. As if it had been laid down carefully.
Laid.
The Vicar
next door sometimes kept chickens.
Occasionally the chickens got out.
Once in a blue moon they appeared in our garden.
We could
think of no other source for this egg, so we shared the story with him.
He said that
they haven’t had chickens recently due to the depredations of particularly active
urban foxes. So that egg had to be more than
a year old.
Nigel shook
it. Something inside rattled. Yep. This was an old egg.
So it makes
you think, doesn’t it – if something as large and obvious as a chicken egg
could remain unnoticed in our well-tended small garden, what other amazing creatures
are there for us to discover on this great planet of ours? And can we find them before they become
extinct?
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