Suffolk emu Dexy 'doesn't fancy' Eyeleen – leaving farm with 14 giant eggs that take 35 minutes to boil
A male emu at a Suffolk farm has failed to fertilise any of the 14 eggs laid by his one-eyed companion Eyeleen – perhaps because he doesn't fancy her enough. The upside: each egg makes scrambled egg for four.
Love is in the air at Cloverfield Farm in Crowfield, Suffolk. Unfortunately, it seems to be going only one way.
Over the past few weeks Eyeleen the emu has laid 14 eggs. Her companion, a young male called Dexy, hasn’t fertilised a single one. Co-owner Jo Saberton said Dexy was good at helping to sit on the eggs, but added: “I think he’s just very young, maybe he doesn’t fancy Eyeleen enough.” The pair “get on OK”, she said, “but I’m not quite sure we’re ever going to have the patter of little emu feet.”
Stock photo: an emu – not Dexy. Photo: Mike Pennington / CC BY-SA 2.0 (Geograph via Wikimedia Commons), Matlock Farm Park.
The names are a love story of their own. Eyeleen is called that because she lost one of her eyes, and Dexy is named after Dexys Midnight Runners, the band behind Come On Eileen. Jo’s husband Nick wondered whether Eyeleen’s single eye had made Dexy “a bit more fussy” – despite her “long legs”.
AI illustration. (Spot Gaz, our gorilla, hiding somewhere in this picture.)
At least the eggs don’t go to waste. Each one is dark emerald green and roughly the size and weight of 12 chicken eggs, so a single scrambled emu egg feeds four. The couple’s grandsons tried one as a boiled egg with soldiers – it took 35 minutes to boil, and they gave it the thumbs up.
AI illustration.
Stock photo: emu eggs at a Devon farm – not Eyeleen’s. Photo: Roger Cornfoot / CC BY-SA 2.0 (Geograph via Wikimedia Commons).
In the UK, emus usually lay in winter, and it’s the males that do the incubating. Last year the farm did nothing with 28 eggs. Some may just stay on the shelf: “They do look so lovely, you don’t really want to break them because they look like an ornament.”
Reported by BBC News (Connor Bennett and Alice Cunningham).
