The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg by Tim Birkhead – review

The eccentric lives of or egg collectors have inspired an exquisite book

Tim Birkhead features prominently in the acknowledgments pages of one of the most brilliantly eccentric books of recent years, Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, in which the author attempted to experience life in the skins of a menagerie of different animals, from a badger to a swift. Birkhead is, like Foster, a peculiarly English phenomenon: an adventurer, a naturalist and, atypically for an author whose career has branched from the arcane – one of his first published books was Sperm Competition in Birds – into popular science, a gifted writer.

There are facts about eggs here that will only be known to a handful of scientists

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