EGG WATCH

Rex Burress

My breakfast egg had a thin shell and broke before I got it fully in the pan! Amid the mumbling about the mess, I started thinking about the great DDT dilemma we had in the mid-1900's when Rachel Carson sounded the alarm with her book, “Silent Spring.”

The side-effects of that DDT pesticide [like the side-effects of some pills], was the startling realization that wild birds began laying thin-shelled eggs that broke in the nest! It took some difficult legislation to correct that serious threat to bird life and I'm glad to say birds still sing in the spring!

Generally, it's well known that birds need to eat sand and small stones to provide grit for the gizzard to pulverize seeds and foods. We know birds have no teeth and depend on a horny beak and a “crop” storage sac to hold food before it enters a first stomach of breakdown acids, and a second stomach containing the gizzard. Some chicken owners provide pulverized oyster shell or even crushed egg shell to aid the digestive process and supplement calcium to make stronger eggshell.

Barnyard chickens are prone to eat any maggoty, rotten, manure things so vulgarly that my Uncle Frank, during his brief farming venture, refused to eat chickens to his dying day! Think about range chicken eggs!

The fact that a bird is reproduced through the development of an egg is a wondrous bit of drama, totally beyond complete understanding, as amazing as the live birth of most mammals. We're constantly confronted with “why” was life conceived this way, and “how” was it created. It's life and death anyway you look at it. “Life through replication.” Each species endowed with special characteristics. A name and a life-history study for each species, much to the delight of bird watchers and naturalists, without even delving too deeply into technicalities.

I was so fascinated with the beauty and wonder of bird eggs when I was a boy on a Missouri farm, that I started a bird-egg collection. Thus I scoured the springtime fields to find nests, carefully remove one egg, transport it home and drill one hole in the side to suck out the yolk. I was left with a distinctly designed shell of 97% calcium carbonate crystals, properly labeled with species name and location, nestled into a cottony tray! My “wildlife corner” in the basement was expanding! As was my knowledge of bird lore. Egg collections are probably illegal now, or require a scientific permit.

I went to extreme effort to add eggs to my juvenile museum exhibit—even climbing a thorn tree to reach a crow's nest, but the splotched green egg was a prize to me, as was the pearly white egg-jewel from a bank swallow nest, hard-gained from a holey high bank over No Creek. At the end of my rope, I was dive-bombed by fussy bank swallows and had to reach blindly into a hole, but there it was!--at arm's length, the nest of eggs!

When I worked at the Oakland Rotary Nature Center, I discovered in the archives a collection of eggs made by naturalist Bugs Cain, including giant ostrich and emu eggs, plus the tiny hummingbird egg, and he had gone a step farther, adding a study skin of each species!

Outside, hidden on the islands and all through the park, mallard hens stashed nests of a dozen eggs. Soon the mad scramble of ducklings, gulls and herons eating ducklings, and duckling retrievals from the tops of tall buildings and gutters commenced. “Plenty of eggs!” The show was emphasized by boy ducks chasing female ducks often to the point of gang rape. Added to the refuge mallard madness was the unflattering trait of the male leaving all the chick raising to the female!

Eggs are prominent birth-ways of other animals, too, as nearly all insect species lay some kind of egg. Some snakes lay eggs, while others, like rattlesnakes, give live birth. Most reptiles, including turtles, and certainly amphibians, lay rubbery eggs. In the seasonal streams on Table Mountain, newt salamanders gather during the flower-time to have egg-laying frenzies, often locking in copulatory compulsion mingled with clusters of soft egg masses. Frogs do it too, croaking into utter embraces amid gelatinous strands of life.

“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.”

--Mark Twain

“Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.”

--Henry David Thoreau