Was it a melon, a giant puffball mushroom or somebody’s idea of a practical joke?
Biologists were baffled — and skeptical — when they heard on Thursday, Sept. 11 that 13-year-old Raleigh Fosburgh had found an extra-large, mysterious egg-shaped object near a streambed at McCollum Park, east of I-5 off 128th Street SE just outside the Mill Creek city limits.
On Sept. 12, experts gathered at Raleigh’s Everett home. To their surprise, they discovered that the object with a leathery skin, about the size and weight of a honeydew melon, was a 3-pound ostrich egg. And the egg contained an embryo.
“It’s an African ostrich egg,” said Greg Toffic, curator of birds at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. “I was flabbergasted. This is a very unlikely place to find it.”
Terry West, a horticulturist with Washington State University Cooperative Extension, agreed with Toffic. This wasn’t a melon, since something inside it sloshed back and forth when it was tipped. “I don’t know of any melon that’s like that,” West said.
The egg’s discovery led observers to wonder whether an ostrich might be living inside the Snohomish County park near the busy I-5 interchange.
Toffic inspected the canopy of Douglas firs that rise high above the park’s woodland trails.
“An ostrich may be able to survive here for a little while, but this is nowhere near its natural habitat,” Toffic said.
Toffic and West followed Raleigh to a damp bank above North Creek where he and his sister, Chelsey, 16, said they found the egg on Sept. 11.
West said there are no ostrich farms nearby. And it is illegal to import ostrich eggs with embryos. If it was left there by someone, “they may have picked it up on vacation and then decided to get rid of it,” Toffic said.
An adult ostrich can grow to 6 or 7 feet tall and weigh more than 500 pounds, Toffic said. “The hen lays the egg and the father does the incubation,” he said.
“If you encounter an ostrich in the woods, there are no special precautions you should take, not like a bear,” Toffic added. “It’s unlikely you’ll encounter one, though.”
Raleigh said he first spied the egg on Wednesday, Sept. 10, as he walked with friends on one of the park’s trails. Moving in for a closer look, he spotted a large, cream-colored object near the creek. He left the trail and crawled through a wooded area to get a better look at it.
“My friends thought it was a soccer ball,” said Raleigh. “I touched it. It was warm.”
He left it where he found it. That evening he told his mother, Arley Fosburgh, about his discovery.
The next day, Arley Fosburgh asked her daughter to accompany Raleigh to the creek to pick up the 10-inch-long egg, which has a circumference of 19 inches at its widest point. By the time he retrieved it, the egg was cold, Raleigh said.
At first, family members thought it might be a type of melon, but when they tipped it back and forth, it felt like there was a solid ball inside rolling back and forth.
“That would be the embryo,” Toffic explained.
The decomposing embryo may contain dangerous bacteria, such as botulism, in addition to hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas, Toffic said. He told the Fosburghs not to crack open the egg unless they took safety precautions and wore goggles and gloves.
Raleigh plans to keep the egg.
“If it breaks, it’s going to really stink,” Toffic warned.
“And I guess no omelets or anything like that,” Arley Fosburgh said.
Janice Podsada is a reporter with The Herald in Everett.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
