Birds' Eggs 



a hawk, an owl, a plover, as the case may be ; and, what is 

 more, the experienced man can say something of the nest 

 in which a particular egg was laid. We hope to show 

 how this may be accomplished and also that there is more 

 in an egg than meets the eye sometimes there is a good 

 deal more, but that is another story. 



The sizes of eggs, needless to say, vary enormously 

 from those of the extinct sepyornis, the contents of whose 

 egg measured at least three gallons, to the tiny egg of the 

 humming-bird, a striking contrast indeed. Confining 

 ourselves to present-day eggs, the contrast between the 

 largest, laid by the ostrich, and the smallest, that of the 

 humming-bird, there is an enormous difference. The size 

 of an egg does not, of necessity, bear any strict relation- 

 ship to the size of the mother bird that is to say, if we 

 had twelve eggs of various sizes and arranged them in the 

 order of their sizes, we could not say of a certainty that 

 the birds if arranged according to size would come in the 

 same order as the eggs. The kiwi, for instance, lays an 

 enormous egg for its size, one quarter as large as itself, in 

 fact. The snipe and the blackbird are about the same 

 size, yet the egg of the former is very much larger than 

 that of the latter. For this reason it is unsafe to predict 

 the size of a bird from the dimensions of its egg, as has 

 been done in the case of certain fossil eggs of extinct birds. 

 Some of these eggs are of gigantic proportions, as we have 

 mentioned earlier, and surmising that the mother must 

 be as large in comparison, geologists have described 

 imaginary birds too large to be credible. 



The numbers of eggs laid by any one bird vary as much 

 as their sizes. Certain birds lay but a single egg, the 

 puffin and the hornbill for example. Many birds, like the 

 nightjar and the pigeons, confine themselves to a couple. 

 At the other extreme are such birds as the kingfisher and 

 the wryneck, the former of which will lay its own weight 

 in e gg s should occasion arise, whilst the latter has been 

 known to lay as many as forty-three eggs. But these are 



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