Eggs, Eggs and More Eggs

My entire life I have found songbird eggs particularly pleasing. I don't know exactly why-- but I do know I like their shape, smoothness and size (chicken eggs are too big to be fun to hold). When I was seven or eight years old my dad gave me a present of a small, carved red Easter egg (we were living in England at the time and I'm not sure where he picked it out, perhaps some flea market that he liked to frequent), which instantly became one of my most treasured possessions (in fact, I was willing to part with all my jewelry but not this tiny carved Easter egg which I still consider one of my most precious possessions all these years later).

When I lived in the Netherlands, I often found eggshells along the bike path that I traveled every day to and from school. I would pick them up and cradle them in my hands, gingerly balancing and biking one handed the whole way home. When we left the Netherlands I packed my collection of eggshells into a small tin box that had been used to hold candied cherries, and packed in the foam they have survived intact to this day (though at this point I question why I continue to hold onto something like that for purely sentimental value...)

So it's no big surprise that when I started this project in DC I was enraptured with the birds' eggs we found nest searching. I only took eggs from those nests that had been abandoned for several weeks or depredated. Mostly I just took pictures. (I did bring my dad a present of four perfect robins' eggs for father's day and though I broke one cleaning them for him, I believe he liked and kept the rest.)

Below is a cardinal's nest that we came across at our Chevy Chase site. It has two cardinal's eggs in it and two brown headed cowbird eggs in it (for anyone unfamiliar with the cowbird, it is a brood parasite that lays its eggs in other birds' nests for the other birds to raise; it is detested by many birders but I think they are really amazing birds and once wrote an article about them for a wildlife magazine).


Here's a close up of a cardinal's egg (the larger, more streaky one on the right) and a brown headed cowbird egg (the smaller, more spotted one on the left). You can see why the cardinals have trouble picking out the cowbird eggs, can't you?


Below is a brown headed cowbird egg next to two robin eggs. American robins don't generally fall for the cowbird's attempt to parasitize their nests.


And here is a banded female brown headed cowbird. Not much to look at it. The cowbirds have a nice, very distinctive call though that sounds like a high pitched tinkly, gurgly waterfall to me.


Also at our Chevy Chase site, I discovered a nest in a wreath on a door with two sets of eggs in it, each distinctly different from each other. (On a different note, the owners of this house had no idea that they had a nest in the wreath on their door which I must admit stunned me. I like to think I'm not that clueless but I know that in reality there are plenty of things I am completely oblivious to in life, though they generally have to do with pop culture and people, not nature).


And just in case you can't see it either, I've circled the nest in the photo below for you:

When no one incubated the eggs in this nest in the wreath and they were still there two months later, I pilfered them for my collection, unbeknownst to the owners of the house (I figured if they didn't know the nest was there in the first place they probably wouldn't miss the eggs either).


Here's a close up of the eggs-- I'm not sure which species they belong to, though I was initially convinved the streaky one was a cardinal's egg.


I became intrigued with identifying these eggs, and wondered whether the spotted one might not be a brown headed cowbird egg, so I took my cowbird egg out of my collection and compared it to the other two. The known cowbird egg is the one in the middle in the photo below. I believe it is smaller and a different shape than the two eggs from the Chevy Chase wreath nest. I guess the identity of the species that laid these eggs will remain a mystery to me.


And finally, a comparison of the mystery eggs to a robin's egg-- they are much smaller.