An Early Egg
A correspondent reports a February egg, which he picked up unbroken. He describes it as pale blue and asks if such an egg is unusual in February and if I can identify it ; he himself suggesting a starling. I have now had the very bad luck to mislay his letter, and I would anyway never guess at a bird's egg without seeing it. But it may interest him to know that it is always the eggs of starlings which I myself pick up unbroken on the lawn in spring, sometimes at the rate of several a day, and that it is said that a bird's egg is too light ever to break itself by falling on grass. It may interest him still further, since he writes from Oxford, to hear the story of a group of Dons (Cambridge, of course) who are reported to have collected a large number of thrushes' eggs in order to test this theory. The solemn occasion of these gentlemen tossing so many small blue eggs into the air and letting them fall on the sacred college grass is, I think, one of the age's major contributions to the study of ornithology.
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