The Mysterious Appearance of Eggs

We have a lot of trees and birds in our yard. A lot. I don’t know all the names of them. Some of them not very typical yard-type birds, such as lovebirds and a pair of visiting hawks (they live in a giant tree down the street). We even had a crane who ate some of our koi about 10 or so years ago. That one was a surprise and I was also hard-pressed, initially, to get people on board with me in fingering the crane as the koi thief (another story for another time). However, a couple of days ago I saw the boys bent over looking at something along one of the block walls and asked them what they were doing. They were looking at the eggs in the image above. We don’t have chickens. There are some somewhere in the neighborhood–NextDoor has told me so. However, this is not a case of random chickens laying their eggs on our property. A pile of eggs showed up behind one of the slender trees along our driveway one day and disappeared the next. Our electric gate is closed at night, sometimes during the day for short periods of time, so that seems like a lot of work to “hide” eggs that weren’t really hidden.

We close our gate to keep our dogs in the yard (Flanders is a flight risk), besides it’s just polite to keep your dogs reined in. As much as I love dogs not everyone does. Some people are scared or terrified of them. At any rate, the boys finished chores and we didn’t do anything about the eggs. I was too lazy and curious about them (didn’t want to disturb the “crime” scene, too much CSI)–no one seemed to know anything about them. Before you say someone put them there to egg a neighbor a) I did think of that and b) no one on our block was egged. I went out the next morning to finally deal with them and they were gone. I was partly okay with that because I didn’t really want to touch these mystery eggs and I partly wondered if a homeless person somehow decided that was a good place to store them. Logistically, that wouldn’t be the best place for someone to do it, either. We have a lot of homeless who walk and kind of live along the canal, although not too many along our stretch for quite a while. I mention them because when we first moved into this house, a homeless guy was hanging his backpack on our side of the block wall while he roamed, his load lightened. I’m sure he did it so no one would steal his things. I don’t know how long this went on or if it was a one-off thing. Our dog at the time was barking hysterically at the backpack hidden, hanging in our oleanders. I went to see what she was barking at and was standing there looking at it when the guy came back for it. The three of us were in agreement that situation wasn’t ideal.

Again, I mention the homeless because I’d feel bad destroying something of theirs when they don’t have much. I actually have a few homeless stories but this is about eggs. Initially, I didn’t want to do anything about it because they looked purposely placed but at the same time it was a little creepy that someone wandered onto our property, placed eggs (makes me think of So I Married an Axe Murderer, when the sister is shrieking and yelling at Mike Meyers’ character that he’s not supposed to be in the room when the note has been place 🤷🏻‍♀️), and then returned for them. So I guess this is just about boundaries as much as it is about mystery eggs. Who knew?