What is it about birds? They are the wild creatures we see most often, their doings and calls a daily reassurance that humans are not isolated in our sentience. They descend from the first reptiles, while we come from the first mammals. Across a gulf of evolution we contemplate a parallel life which has evolved exhilaratingly different answers to the same questions that existence asks of us. Cross-referencing allows us to address the fundamentals. Darwin and his finches revealed how we came to be. What else might birds teach us?
Addressing questions because we can conceive them is the spirit of The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg by Tim Birkhead, author of the acclaimed Bird Sense. This follow-up has an appeal less obvious, but anyone drawn to the natural sciences will relish it.
Birkhead journeys inwards from the calcium spires of the shell, between which air passes (eggs breathe), across the albumen, an alkaline Sahara to a microbe, its nutrients locked up in inaccessible protein, which protects the yolk.
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