This summer was so wonderful, being able to exercise nearly every day, taking life slow. I've been going on a lot of walks in my new neighborhood. A month ago I found this little egg lying on the sidewalk, just down from my house. I thought that it must have accidentally fallen from its nest.
I cradled it in my hand for the next 30 minutes, thinking of how I wanted to honor the bird's life that never would live by photographing it. It sat on my windowsill for weeks as I busied myself with cooking projects and endless experiments in fermentation. The shell had been broken in the fall, and while tiny and seemingly innocuous -- the baby egg started to smell. It was slowly turning and disintegrating into something else. It was time to finally photograph it, or go put it outside under a tree.
I thought of how to shoot it. I placed the little orb on my photo light table, which made it glow from below, turning it into a massive-looking planet. I tried to set up a seamless background slope with a piece of plexiglass I bought from the hardware store, but I ended up liking this image with the horizon line more than those images.
Afterwards the shoot, I was curious about what type of bird egg I had found, so I did some research. I learned on NestWatch.org that the Brown Headed Cowbird is a parasitic laying bird, which means that the mother bird lays her egg in a nest of another bird species. I'd never heard of such a thing! Brown Headed Cowbirds don't raise their own young! And they have an aggressive, domineering way of being with other birds. I had imagined that the egg had fallen mistakenly from the nest, when it is very possible that the mother bird who found the imposing egg might have deliberately purged it from her nest, crashing it to the ground for me to find.
No matter what happened before I found it, I still would like to honor this little bird's life. All of us are trying to make it in the world. Some more forcefully, others more peacefully.
Another version of the Brown Headed Cowbird egg, shot on a light table in the studio. Photograph © Tracey Haynes 2014