The Colour Collaborative: March: Egg

I'm rather in love with birds' eggs. That gorgeous smooth roundness and the subtleties of colour and pattern. Each egg perfectly suited to its environment both in shading and shape.

The extent of our egg collection can pretty much be seen above. We have a few more fragments, but these are our best two bits. I love the little mark on the blue egg where the chick had a go at getting out before he actually managed it.

Museums tend to have vast collections shut away in drawers, but now most of our information comes from pictures. The biggest boy has a copy of the Observer's Book of Birds' Eggs which is a favourite of mine. I never get tired of flicking through and admiring the eggs. Little speckles of grey on a
chiffchaff egg or brown watercolour stains on a willow warbler egg. All nicely done according to where the nest will be.

The shape matters as well.

Long pointy eggs don't roll as easily and fit alongside each other better. But look at the little owl's egg, almost perfectly round.

I've recently been looking at the makers of replica eggs and realising what an art it is. Each bird's egg is different, so two eggs from the same species could look quite distinct from each other. A good egg painter will capture the essence of the egg and in many cases they look indistinguishable from the real thing.

I shall be on the lookout for empty pieces of shell this year and seeing if I can identify them. The humblest or smallest birds can have the most beautiful egg colouring and patterning.

And at the grander end of the scale there is the magnificent golden eagle egg. A creamy buff background touched with dark gold and brown splotches, perfect camouflage for an untidy nest of sticks and heather.

Then there's the cuckoo's egg. It has a range of colour and marking and sometimes nicely matches the eggs of the birds in whose nest the egg is laid. The chick pushes out any other eggs or chicks to ensure it has the parents all to itself. I'm not sure I approve.

The egg I shall be looking for and hoping to find this year (only after it's hatched of course) is that of the song thrush.

To quote the Observer's book, "The ground colour is a beautifully clear pale greenish-blue - almost turquoise - and the markings consist of specks, spots and blotches of a very deep olive-green, black or reddish-brown."  That pale greenish-blue is one of my very favourite colours, cool, calm and serene.

To visit the other Colour Collaborative blogs for more of this month's posts, just click on the links below:

            Annie at Annie Cholewa                 Gillian at Tales from a Happy House 

           Jennifer at Thistlebear                   Sarah at Mitenska                              

What is The Colour Collaborative?

All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when a group of them work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. We'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways.