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The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg by Tim Birkhead. 2016. Bloomsbury, New York, NY, USA. xviþ 304 pp., 15 color and 3 black-and-white photographs. $27 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1632863690. Murres (or guillemots), as their lifelong devotee and steward Tim Birkhead well knows, have phenomenal eggs. Laid precariously on narrow ledges, they are variously multicolored and patterned, decorated with feces, and unusually conical (we’ll avoid the term pyriform, as Dr. Birkhead has never seen a pear that reminded him of a murre egg). His fascination with these eggs, and a recent desire to understand the function of their shape, eventually led him to write The Most Perfect Thing, the latest in a series of books aimed at inspiring a general audience to understand and value birds (e.g., The Wisdom of Birds [2008] and Bird Sense [2013]). The goal of this book is to open up the bird egg, that ‘‘self-contained life support system,’’ to readers, from the outside to the inside, and from the follicle to hatching. As Dr. Birkhead is also a historian of science specializing in ornithology, readers are treated to nearly as much storytelling as scientific explanation, and of course the two sorts of writing are not mutually exclusive. The social circumstances surrounding a discovery, the series of hypotheses and tests that led to a (perhaps still uncertain) conclusion, and the personal narratives that explain why somebody was hanging from a cliff in Bempton grasping for an egg in 1832, all add richness and a human element. This context is especially useful in this age when we frequently must defend our research interest in nature for its own sake. As the author states in the Epilogue, ‘‘The study of birds’ eggs may seem an indulgence. Who cares about eggs?’’ Readers of The Auk will not need the answer, but of course this book is not primarily for us—it is for the open-minded uninitiated, such as one reader who commented on Amazon.com, ‘‘[I] never expected to get enthusiastic about an egg!’’ This is a colorful manifesto and enthusiastic scientific introduction to the bird egg. We should not expect a full monograph reviewing what is known about eggs (which, by the way, we especially need since the spectacular resurgence of ornithological oology in the past 20 years). The Most Perfect Thing is to that imagined tome as Nick Davies’s Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature (2015) is to Bob Payne’s The Cuckoos (2005).

the auk/the auk

<i>The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg</i><b>The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg</b> by Tim Birkhead. 2016. Bloomsbury, New York, NY, USA. xvi + 304 pp., 15 color and 3 black-and-white photographs. $27 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1632863690.

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's EggThe Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg by Tim Birkhead. 2016. Bloomsbury, New York, NY, USA. xvi + 304 pp., 15 color and 3 black-and-white photographs. $27 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1632863690.