Nests and Eggs

I love birds and I love their eggs. I've been collecting nests and fallen, broken and/or hatched eggs in the wild for many, many years. I used to have an amazing little nest whose shape was absolutely perfect (an anal bird, after my own heart) and in it I had all the tiny broken eggs and feathers I had been collecting for eons. The eggs were of all different colors, from various species of songbirds and there were feathers of all sizes and colors as well. I kept the nest tucked inside a china cabinet where it was safe from my marauding cat until one afternoon when, in a lapse of judgment, I forgot to put it back after adding a new find to it. I went out to do some errands and when I came home all the eggs had been eaten with just tiny flecks of color left here and there on the floor, every last feather had been chewed down to nothing and the nest itself lay scattered in loose and broken pieces in a trail between several rooms. I was heartbroken, and angry at both the cat and myself. I have collected a few nests since then, but no eggs, and nothing has come close to the perfection of that one beautiful little nest.

I recently bought a book called, not surprisingly given this topic, Egg & Nest* and it's simply amazing. The photographs of the eggs and nests stored for decades in the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology's headquarters are enough to take your breath away and the history of egg collecting is equally as fascinating.

I don't usually draw eggs as they're really rather simple and, to be perfectly honest, just plain boring to draw, but I do keep the more beautiful ones that my chickens and ducks have laid. In fact, I have an entire carton in my refrigerator of the first eggs ever laid by my little Bantam East Indie duck hen named Babette Fleur, all of which look exactly like Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm Number 30. Since my girls are getting older and not laying many eggs at all anymore, I thought I'd draw a few of the different eggs they lay while they're still laying them, however sporadic that might be.

*Egg & Nest, by Rosamund Purcell, Linneas S. Hall and Rene Corado, Harvard University Press, 2008

Two Duck Eggs Flanked by Two Chicken Eggs, pastel on paper, 2009