BIRD ARTISTS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 696, 22 June 1929, Page 26

BIRD ARTISTS

SKILL OF THE SPARROW WHY EGGS ARE COLOURED ‘■My own belief is that the colouring of birds’ eggs had in its origin nothing whatever to do with utility,” writes Mr. Charles S. Bayne in ‘'The Call of the Birds.” “It is primarily a matter of temperament, just as the painting of pictures. “I can see hands raised in horror at such an idea, but I have never been able to understand why, in all our discussions and inquiries regarding the lower animals, we invariably begin by assuming that they have no interest whatever in their own lives or possessions, but are merely so many spinning tops set going and entirely controlled by fate, or just so much mechanical mud actuated by something akin to electricity and moulded by the freakish thumb of circumstance. “I do not suggest that if we were to give a hedge sparrow hands she would forthwith proceed to paint seascapes or fields of corn-flowers, or even only vases of violets, but I do believe that, without any loss of dignity or any wounding of our amour propre, we may admit that she has a simple and sound taste for a very charming shade of blue. “It must he remembered that in most cases the colouring matter is no part of the shell’s composition. It has not been produced by selected changes in the varying substance of the eggshell, but is an entirely new and separate acquisition, a thing which, if there had been none but white eggs four hundred years ago, a man might have been burned at the stake for impiously prophesying. The shell is white and the colours are usually washed upon its outside surface in one or more coats, and whether the result is useful or not the result is always beautiful. In other words the bird paints her eggs with her oviduct as the artist paints his canvas with his hands.