Egg & Nest | 
 enlarge | Authors: Rosamond Purcell, Linnea S. Hall, Rene Corado
Creator: Bernd Heinrich
Publisher: Belknap Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $25.05
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 13951
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 232
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.7
Dimensions (in): 10.4 x 10.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0674031725
Dewey Decimal Number: 598.14680222
EAN: 9780674031722
ASIN: 0674031725
Publication Date: October 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
The beauty of the robin’s egg is not lost on the child who discovers the nest, nor on the collector of nature’s marvels. Such instances of wonder find fitting expression in the photographs of Rosamond Purcell, whose work captures the intricacy of nests and the aesthetic perfection of bird eggs. Mining the ornithological treasures of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, Purcell produces pictures as lovely and various as the artifacts she photographs. The dusky blue egg of an emu becomes a planet. A woodpecker’s nest bears an uncanny resemblance to a wooden shoe. A resourceful rock dove weaves together scrap metal and spent fireworks. A dreamscape of dancing monkeys emerges from the calligraphic markings of a murre egg. Alongside Purcell’s photographs, Linnea Hall and Rene Corado offer an engaging history of egg collecting, the provenance of the specimens in the photographs, and the biology, conservation, and ecology of the birds that produced them. They highlight the scientific value that eggs and nest hold for understanding and conserving birds in the wild, as well as the aesthetic charge they carry for us. How has evolution shaped the egg or directed the design of the nest? How do the photographs convey such infinitesimal and yet momentous happenstance? The objects in Egg & Nest are specimens of natural history, and in Purcell’s renderings, they are also the most natural art. (20080907)
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| Customer Reviews:
A Celebration of Oology September 18, 2008
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's a famous conundrum, but a bogus one; the mutation that created the genus Gallus induced a chicken to hatch from an egg laid by a bird not quite of that taxon. Of course, it was the egg that came first.
An understanding of eggs is prerequisite to a true comprehension of the birds they deliver. Much of our modern knowledge of bird eggs, and the diverse nests that harbor them, is based on the work of egg-collectors (oologists) from a century or more ago. At the height of its popularity, commercial and otherwise irresponsible egg collecting tarnished oology's image, but its scientific value persists and cannot be underestimated. A staggering database survives in the form of well-tended egg collections, including those of the British Museum, the Smithsonian and others. Less well-known is the biggest collection of them all, that of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, founded in 1956 by Ed Harrison, with over 190,000 sets and a million individual eggs, as well as 18,000 nests and 54,000 study skins.
Harvard University Press has just produced a beautiful new book celebrating this collection. Egg & Nest is first and foremost a picture book, featuring spectacular photographs by the gifted Rosamond Purcell, whose collaborations with Stephen Jay Gould and her own books, including Dice, Bookworm and Owls Head, are well-known. Over 175 color photographs of the WFVZ collection are featured, each one an aesthetic and zoological pleasure. Many of the images simply glorify the obvious beauty of their subjects: the deep glossy greens of tinamou eggs, the marbled copper patina of Emu eggs, the dainty hieroglyphics gracing Icterid eggs, and the 2-dimensional calcium carbonate filligree shrouding the eggs of the Guira Cuckoo. Others aim to inform us: desiccated maggots still clinging to the collapsed hull of a Brown pelican egg, a victim of organochlorine pesticides; a series of deformed chicken eggs, some resembling pallid gourds, one of them double-shelled--a window bored into the outer shell reveals its hidden twin. Some of the plates thrill us with their rarity: eggs and study skins of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Passenger Pigeons and Carolina Parakeets stand beside centuries-old Elephant Bird eggs and a mounted Heath Hen. Others charm us with their novelty, like a number of wren and hummingbird nests built in and upon chunks of human hardware. Each plate is captioned with collection data, and, in most cases, with background on the subject's natural history.
The plate section is contained within bookends: the first one containing a general introduction by biologist Bernd Heinrich and an introduction to the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology written by Linnea S. Hall, its executive director, and Rene Corado, its collections manager. This section includes a history of the collection and its founder, and of the practice of oology. The final bookend was penned by the photographer, and includes poetic reflections on her experience photographing the collection. Throughout, the text is well-written, with the layperson in mind, but containing enough good information to satisfy the expert.
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