Cones and stones, and other wild nature. We’re in winter here and yet we found a bird nest on the path with a small white egg still intact. Commissioners Track, East Roxburgh, Central Otago. 06 Aug 2022. New Zealand.
An upright, fastigiate or columnar pine.
Wonderful dense foliage.. lovely shaped tree.
Text and photos by Liz; Exploring Colour (2022)
keywords: conifer, nest, egg, pine needles
Exploring Colour 
Our evergreen trees have tons of pinecones this year–a sign of a cold winter to come?
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For your sake I hope not Madeline! The Q intrigued me so I did a v.quick search and found: Pine cones take two years to develop, so what we can tell when we see a lot of pine cones, is that they’ve had two seasons of good climates, Jay Dee Gunnell, a Utah State University Horticulturist, said. … Sugar turns to starch and the tree can store that for its next season. | On the same web page I also noted.. When stressed by drought (which is very common in California over the past few years), pine trees will create a “stress-crop” of cones, easily seen on the branches.
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The egg in the nest is intriguing, Liz. It makes me wonder what happened.
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Winter and we’ve had bad storms recently including very wild wind. Most likely this old nest with the unhatched egg was blown out of a nearby tree.
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That makes sense. Too bad the egg didn’t get to hatch.
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I wonder if it’s a sparrow egg? I didn’t have any idea but apparently they lay small white eggs.
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There are entire books with nothing but birds’ eggs, Liz. Most of us will never get to see even a fraction of them.
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True. We’re far more limited in the number of bird species here though. I rarely get opportunity to look into a nest and see the eggs but I could/should do a little book browsing and get to know a few of the more common eggs!
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Same here, Liz, I’m not familiar with most eggs. I can’t imagine that people collected them by the millions. It actually makes me sad to think about all that loss of potential life.
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Oh yes, I’d forgotten.. that was quite a thing wasn’t it. Awful.
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