I suspect for most people, any long-term thoughts about eggs have probably been confined to which end of a boiled one you eat first (little-endians, you are wrong).
But Tim Birkhead isn’t most people. For a start, he’s a serious academic who’s able to make science as appealing as hot buttered toast. He’s also spent the past 40 years studying, amongst other things, guillemots on the island of Skomer. Throw in a few appearances on BBC Radio 4 and a number of well received books to his name and the crowd that had gathered to hear his talk, ‘A Bird’s Egg - The Most Perfect Thing,’ at the seabird centre one grizzly Wednesday evening had high expectations. And they weren’t disappointed.
The talk’s title is a quote by a 19th century American abolitionist called Thomas Wentworth Higginson who said: 'I think that, if required on pain of death to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird's egg’.
And with around 60,000 guillemots nesting on the ledges of Bempton Cliffs, it was appropriate that the perfect thing referred to most should be these auks' eggs and their unusual pear shape (or pyriform, to give them their posh name).
Now for years, we’ve told our visitors – and in fairness, the experts have supported us in this belief – that the guillemot egg’s shape is an adaptation that’s come about because of the bird's precarious nesting habits. The elongated egg is less likely to fall off the narrow cliff ledges they prefer because, due to its shape, it spins rather than rolls.
But, Tim explained, it appears this might not be so. The latest scientific investigations, and the first discussions on the subject started with William Harvey in the 1600s so this theory hasn’t been rushed into, is that the shape has more to do with how the egg is delivered not what happens to it once it’s been laid. The shell is significantly thicker at the pointy end, which comes out first, and this means it’s less likely to be damaged when it hits the hard surface of the cliff.
But even this this explanation isn't 100% cut and dried. The shape could possibly be due to making incubation more efficient as this takes place with the egg in a semi-upright position or simply because they’re easier to lay. So the mystery continues.
More mysterious still though was Tim’s story about the German farmer whose hens laid eggs on his desk and were so tame they allowed him to mark the shells with an X as they appeared at the point of exit so he could prove they turned before they popped out.
As they say, there’s nowt so queer as folk. And there’s nowt so fascinating as an evening spent in the company of Tim Birkhead.
Tim Birkhead’s latest book, The Most Perfect Thing – Inside and Outside a Bird’s Egg, is published by Bloomsbury in April 2016.