Tim Birkhead features prominently in the acknowledgments pages of one of the most brilliantly eccentric books of recent years, Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, in which the author attempted to experience life in the skins of a menagerie of different animals, from a badger to a swift. Birkhead is, like Foster, a peculiarly English phenomenon: an adventurer, a naturalist and, atypically for an author whose career has branched from the arcane – one of his first published books was Sperm Competition in Birds – into popular science, a gifted writer.
We already knew that Birkhead was an unusual scientist. On the first page of his absorbing Bird Sense, we found the author skinny-dipping in the phosphorescent ocean off the coast of New Zealand with a group of postgraduate students. What really distinguishes him, though, and nowhere more so than in The Most Perfect Thing, is the quality of the prose he employs to describe his feathered subjects. There’s a passage early on in the book where Birkhead is seeking to follow up a hunch about the microscopic surface of a guillemot’s egg. “A diffusing microscope isn’t the best way of examining an egg’s surface,” he writes. “Far more revealing is a scanning electron microscope, which produces lovely, sharp three-dimensional images.” Birkhead’s approach to writing – hard, clear sentences; deep, revelatory looking – has the same effect as his powerful microscope, bringing objects to light that were previously hidden, making us see the familiar with new eyes.
The idea for this book was a quote by the abolitionist (and mentor to Emily Dickinson) Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “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.”
Birkhead takes the reader on a journey into the egg, from the sophisticated porous shell and membrane to the albumen and yolk, weaving this close, scientific study with far-flung narratives of daring egg collectors and oologists (those in the egg-related branch of ornithology). There are facts about eggs here that will only be known to a handful of scientists; others – like the reasons for the dent at the end of a hard-boiled egg – that, even if we already know them, are described with such clarity they strike with the force of revelation.
One of the early characters we meet is the obsessive 1930s egg collector George Lupton, a wealthy lawyer traipsing over Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire in his monomaniacal pursuit of guillemot eggs. Lupton employs “climmers”, who are lowered over the cliffs to collect the eggs (he even allows his daughter to do so). Birkhead renders the rugged coastline and its precarious abseilers in vivid prose. It is a landscape “whose history oozes and drips into my imagination like the guillemot guano from the cliffs themselves”. He roams freely across history and geography, taking us to other seabird colonies and introducing a host of eccentrics, including the Victorian naturalist Charles Waterton, who was also lowered on to the guillemot ledges at Bempton, having earlier climbed St Peter’s in Rome and left his gloves on the lightning rod as a visiting card (the Pope made him climb back up and retrieve them).
There is something solitary, childlike and obsessive about the egg collectors Birkhead introduces us to, who destroy themselves in the endlessly deferred pursuit of completion. We meet the melancholy 17th-century naturalist Sir Thomas Browne, whose collection contains “cranes, storkes, eagles, etc and a variety of water-foule”. We find Spallanzani’s auk egg in the collection of Lord Lionel Rothschild, who paid a fortune for it, then bequeathed it to the Natural History Museum. In Africa, we come across the widow of Major John Colebrook-Robjent, whose extraordinary collection has been the focus of an extended, post-colonial legal battle.
Egg collection is a dying hobby – it has been illegal since 1954 – and rightly so. Only older readers of Birkhead’s book will understand first hand the wily and clandestine thrill of reaching hand into nest and drawing out blue-green eggs (whose colour, we learn here, comes from biliverdin, the pigment responsible for the greenish tinge of bruises). “Birds’ eggs have an erotic aura all of their own,” Birkhead writes and part of this aura comes from the sense of touching something intimate and intricate – “a self-contained life-support system”.
The story of the dissident Soviet oologist Lev Belopol’skii, whose knowledge of seabird eggs helped to feed the stranded city of Murmansk during the second world war, is worth the price of the book alone, although the real story of Birkhead’s “voyage into the secret world of the bird’s egg” is the mind-bending inventiveness of natural selection.
Birkhead writes with what Robert Lowell calls “the grace of accuracy”, and after reading The Most Perfect Thing, you’ll never dip your morning soldiers without a shiver of wonder at the complexity and resourcefulness of the humble egg.
The Most Perfect Thing is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £13.59
