Now that spring is here, I’ve been seeing eggs everywhere, even where there are none. Take these browned capsules at Braintree Great Pond:

Any fool can see that they’re dried pods, not eggs, and yet they are pale and rounded. What they are exactly, I don’t know.

In contrast, the green, globose items pictured below, in a pouch toward the rear of this female fairy shrimp from a vernal pool in the Blue Hills, are eggs for sure:

Vernal pools are in fact a great place to look for eggs around now.  These were laid by a female spotted salamander in Stony Brook Reservation in Hyde Park:

And here’s some rather egg-like bubbles from a patch of moss in the same pool, perhaps pure oxygen:

These eggy buds from the Neponset Estuary at 2 Adams St in Milton will burst instead of hatch:

At the same time, real eggs–scattered by spawning smelt–speckled the rocks at low tide just below:

Botanists will say that mosses produce spores, not eggs, and yet these rounded yellow items display some egg-iosity:

It may be that eggs are all around us, all the time, if we just know how to look.

Tom Palmer
Staff Naturalist & Photographer
April, 2020