The ingenious egg-eating Dr Cott
Which birds’ eggs taste the best and which taste the worst?’’ In the 1940s, this question puzzled English biologist Hugh Cott so he set about tasting eggs on a heroic scale. Cott organised a panel of tasters at Cambridge University and offered them the eggs of 212 bird species over a period of five years.
His tasting panel became connoisseurs of birds’ eggs with all the finesse of wine tasters as they judged them sweet, nutty, acidic, vile, and so on.
You might think that gulls’ and seabirds’ eggs would taste fishy, but not so. They are as tasty as chooks’ eggs.
In a 178-page account, Cott reported that chooks’, ducks’, gulls’, and emu eggs were the most palatable.
Less tasteful were owls, falcons and rooks, with blackbirds, sparrows and chaffinch eggs found to be nauseous to inedible.
Generally, he found the larger eggs tasted better than small eggs. Strongly marked eggs tasted worse than plain eggs. He suggested that markedly coloured eggs warn predators that they are not worth eating.
But it wasn’t only eggs. Cott wanted to find out which birds people and animals preferred to eat. In
332 trials he offered 35 bird species to hedgehogs and found they had strongly marked likes and dislikes. He continued trials with hornets, rats, ferrets, civets, meerkats, mongoose, foxes, hyenas, dingoes and cats.
Cott found that all these animals liked eating the same birds as humans, that the flesh of many drab-coloured birds was tasty, but the flesh of many brightly or gaudily coloured birds, such as parrots, tasted horrible.
Again, he suggested that bright colours signal or warn predators that these birds are not worth eating.
In 1940, and on a broader scale, Cott wrote a
550-page book called Adaptive Colouration in Animals, in which he summarised all that was known about animal camouflage and mimicry. The book included chapters on merging, disruption, dazzle, decoy, smokescreen, false display of strength, and so forth.
Cott’s compendious knowledge of animal colouration and patterning led to his promotion to Chief Instructor of the British Army’s Camouflage Development and Training College in World War II. He later turned his attention to crocodile nests.
You might think that gulls’ and seabirds’ eggs would taste fishy, but not so. They are as tasty as chooks’ eggs.