Little blue gems
I still get an Easter egg. I like the smaller ones, wrapped in silver and blue foil, the ones with sugary 'creme' inside. It must go back to childhood: lots of things do.
Peering into a bramble bush and seeing those bright blue eggs of the hedge sparrow may have started that. At this very moment there are about four million of these little blue jewels in a million nests in Britain.
Today, kids won't see them as I did. Bird's nesting, once a national sport, became as unfashionable as putting birds into glass cases. Today it is doubtful whether many youngsters would notice a crow's nest in a leafless poplar tree.
It seemed to be a primeval urge then among boys and one or two girls, to find the missing part of the jigsaw. We all knew the names of birds, and which songs belonged to each.
Every country child was in competition with their friends to have that last piece of knowledge, the location of the nest. By the age of seven you knew that hedge sparrows made a mossy cup on the edge of a bramble bush. You hardly had to search: you saw the likely place and you felt the anxious presence of the mother and your eyes dived down like a pearl fisher and picked out the prize.
Most boys had a collection of eggs – one of a species – so the nest was left alone. Oologists and Jourdainists would take dozens of complete clutches of rare birds, but grand larceny was akin to lunacy, even to our untutored minds.
The sight of a new egg, the touch of a perfect shape, the warm intimacy of new life and the special cradle made for its beginning was beyond words. This moment was flesh of earliest creation. Not thinking these words then but years onwards now, I know the egg of the wild bird was the touchstone to the beginning of our time on earth.
Even finding the eggs of the Rhode Island Reds in the hay mangers and the strawstacks of the farmyard could give the same indescribable feeling. But boiling these and slicing off their caps at teatime was in another league altogether.
The stomach was involved in that and all the ritual of buttered fingers of brown bread and a little patch of salt scattered among periwinkle flowers upon the china plate, not to speak of each sibling's special spoon that still had smears of silver plate after a hundred years of boiled eggs for breakfast was pure hedonism.
But back in the wild woods, blue eggs especially meant even more than lapis, turquoise or opal that we learned of later. Gems of the whinchat and the redstart, both blue and the same size as the hedge sparrow as shown here, were special treasures for their rarity.
Today Britain has perhaps a hundred thousand redstarts' nests, ten thousand whinchats. The eggs of song thrushes were everywhere, almost the easiest bird to find.
The hard mud cup was like a chalice in church, a generous container and as perfectly made and solid feeling as silver. The craft in that construction was many millions years older though.
We shinned – a descriptive word – up to crows' nests swaying high up in the willow trees, eager to see those mottled, marbled greeny blue eggs and hear the doleful moan of the old mother crow who feared the worst.
Then there were the jackdaws' eggs, also mainly blue-green but with finer speckles. These were stuffed into half a dozen hollow trees in orchards. Today, about a third of a million jackdaws' nests in Britain will at this moment contain over a million eggs in total, I suppose.
We never saw the blue of a heron's egg, shown here, or that heavily marked egg of the guillemot the biggest egg shown in this picture of shells collected in about 1888 by my grandfather.
Like tomorrow's chocolate egg, they still awake a memory of times past, much further back than we realise. Happy Easter, happy eating.
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Weather for Chichester
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 13 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 29 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 12 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: West
