Tim Birkhead Quotes

When I mentioned to a friend I was writing a book about eggs he told me to be sure to mention how in Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" the young Arabella incubates a sky-blue egg of a song bird in the cleavage of her bosom ... When I checked, I was disappointed to find it wasn't a song thrush egg, but that of a chicken ... The original image in my mind disintegrated like the sound of a vinyl record after the power has been turned off.

Ingeniously, [Heinrich Wickmann] was able to use a pencil to mark that bit of the egg he could see inside the hen's oviduct, through its cloaca prior to laying. (I can just imagine his wife popping into his study with a cup of coffee and seeing Wickmann with his pencil up a hen's bottom: 'What are you doing, dear?' she asks...).

The human eye has long fascinated lovers, artists and physicians. The ancient Greeks dissected eyes, but struggled to understand how they worked, unclear as to whether they received or emanated light.

Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single part of the body.

Rapid and repeated probing, so typical of these wading birds, is thought to allow them to build up a composite three-dimensional image of food items hidden in the sand.24

I am not going to speculate about the emotions that might be involved in avian infidelity.