It was the oddest thing. There beside the ducks’ feeding bowl was a golden egg — seriously, a golden egg. The feeding bowl was full of rainwater and the ducks immediately started splashing in the bowl. I didn’t have the heart to make them stop; so for the time being, I laid out an old newspaper and spread the corn on the paper.
For weeks, the lake had been shrinking and the remaining water was stagnant. There’s nothing like the refreshment of rain after a long drought; not just for ducks but for all of us.
As the rain fell gently, I considered laying in the nearby hammock until I became drenched but instead I watched the inch and three-quarters of rain fill the rain gauge. That’s something we do out here in the Prairie. We ask our neighbors how much rain they have in their rain gauge. No matter how close a neighbor might be you can never tell where the edge of the rain will stop. We brag on our rainfall. Prairie people can make a competitive sport out of rainfall.
When the ducks finished splashing and had eaten their fill of corn, I emptied the rainwater, and it was then that I investigated the nearby egg. At first I thought the egg was just a golden color, like a brown egg, but that wasn’t true. The egg was golden like a “honey moon” when it hangs low on the horizon. The egg was soft, covered only by a membrane. It rolled around in the palm of my hand like a water balloon.
Back at the house Sam was cleaning off his boat from a day of fishing. Then he put his catch on the fish cleaning table and showed them off.
“Big crappie. Not a lot of them, but they’re big.”
“Looks like we’ll have about 16 fillets,” I said.
Big and numerous crappie fillets are something else we brag about.
Then I held out my hand with the golden egg. “Look at this. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Sam touched the egg with his finger and it lolled around exactly like a water balloon.
“No, I haven’t. That’s strange.”
I took the egg into the woods and tossed it. It broke so I went over and examined the skin. It felt like the skin of a turtle egg shell, but even thinner. It looked like a boiled egg with that thin skin, only thicker.
So I did my research and found out a duck or hen’s egg without a shell is not all that uncommon. What I had seen was indeed a yolk and fluid surrounded only by the membrane. There are a number of causes such as stress which a long drought could produce. There’s inadequate calcium intake which would be somewhat unusual for a free range duck. There’s the end of the laying season and sadly as happens to us all, there’s aging.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 43 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.