Science: Bird’s Eggs

When science was young it was possible for a species of goose, whose nesting place had never been found, to be regarded as a creature of marine origin, hatched from a barnacle and thus, not being “flesh,” eligible for Roman Catholic dinner tables on Friday. Modern science knows that the barnacle goose reproduces itself by laying eggs, in the far North like many another bird. Ornithologists have found the nest of every bird that flies (and does not fly), with very few exceptions.

One exception was the surf bird, a species linking the terns and plovers. A rare but well known brown and white spotted frequenter of the Pacific shoreline from Chile to Alaska, where it runs close to foaming breakers on its longish green legs to feed, this bird’s breeding grounds have defied discovery since it was classified and named by Audubon in 1836. Last week, from the University of California, came news that the surf bird’s nest and eggs, too, were found. Ornithologist James Dixon, ferreting among the crags of Mount McKinley, had come upon them, far inland in Alaska.

Of all North American birds, only four now remain to be found nesting. Three are occasional visitors to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands: the bristle-thighed curlew, the Siberian pipit, the sharp-tailed sandpiper. One is a northering fowl: the Chilean skua (“sea hen,” gull family). The rarest eggs sought by North American collectors—aside from the extinct passenger pigeon and great auk—are those of the spoonbill sandpiper, Ross’ gull (found in 1905), Kirtland warbler (1903), knot (Explorer Greely took the first knot’s egg out of a shot bird), sanderling, California condor (only some 50 of these huge naked-headed birds are still extant), Asiatic golden plover, black turnstone, Laguna sparrow, wandering tattler (one egg has been taken, in Alaska), black-capped vireo (range: Texas and Oklahoma), Pacific godwit (Collector Herbert W. Brandt of Cleveland has the only clutches known), and various species of petrel*—Fisher’s, Hornby’s, Peale’s, the scaled species and the rare, night-feeding gon-gon or ghost petrel of the Cape Verde Islands (lately dug in large numbers out of its daytime ground burrows by Ornithologist Finley Simmons of the Blossom expedition).

*Named for Saint Peter, who tried, through faith in Christ, to walk on the waters of Galilee. The petrels have webbed feet which they trail upon the sea’s surface as they search for food, often actually “running” with assistance from their wings.