Common Murre bird eggs can come in a variety of colors and patterns, but they all have the same pointy shape that has intrigued experts since the 1800s. Photo: Frans Lanting/Mint Images/Alamy

Now this is a fun question to try and answer!  An article in Audubon News explains the research that likely corrects the old ideas that it was about not rolling off rocky ledges.

For centuries, people have marvelled at the brown-flecked shell of a murre’s egg, which can range in color from a creamy white to a vibrant turqoise. But murre eggs have also fascinated people for another reason: their unusually angular tip, which is one of the pointiest in the avian kingdom.

In the 1800s, naturalists posited that this shape allowed the eggs to spin like a top in the wind, preventing them from rolling off the narrow ledges where murres nest. That was later disproved. Then, in the mid-1900s, the idea arose that the egg’s downward-angled tip helps it roll in a neat arc, just tight enough to stop it from tumbling into the breakers below. That theory has remained the dominant one and is still widely accepted today.

But British ornithologist Tim Birkhead has studied murres for 44 years, and he has doubts. “In all the time that these ideas had been kicking around, no one had seriously come up with any alternative explanations,” says Birkhead, professor of behavior and evolution at Sheffield University. Now, in two research papers, he’s not only debunked the prevailing rolling theory, but also has laid out his own ideas explaining the eggs’ unusual shape.

Common Murre (All About Birds, Cornell Lab)

Part of the auk family, which has species around the world, murres lay their eggs on skinny rock ledges overlooking the sea. But despite the obvious risks, murres make good parents, says Birkhead, who has studied the birds mostly at Skomer Island off the coast of Wales in the UK. “In fact, very few eggs naturally fall off ledges.” He began to wonder, then, if the birds were so talented at keeping their eggs safe, how could the risk of falling be an evolutionary driver powerful enough to explain their odd shape?

In one of the two recent papers, Birkhead studied Common and Thick-billed Murres and came to the conclusion that the circumference of the egg’s rolling arc is also frequently bigger than the ledge on which murres nest. “I thought, if that isn’t the explanation, then what features of the [murre’s] biology are unique?”

From his years of observation, Birkhead winnowed it down to two features: space and cleanliness. The birds’ nesting ledges are typically cramped—up to 70 murres can inhabit a square meter—and consequently there’s a lot of trampling. Murres are also unwieldy fliers, which can cause them to crash-land onto other birds’ nearby nests. “So the first possibility was that the egg’s shape protects it from impact,” Birkhead says. Intriguingly, he discovered that compared to a typical oval egg, the shape of the murre’s egg places more of the shell in contact with the ground. That would dissipate the force of an impact across its surface, he hypothesized. Incidentally, the eggshell is also thicker in the part of the shell that touches the ground.

“The other feature of [murre] breeding ledges is that they are invariably filthy,” Birkhead says. “Sometimes it’s like going into a pigsty.” More than just a smelly inconvenience, the guano and dirt that encrusts an incubating egg can clog up the pores that allow chicks to breath and also cause infection.

Fortunately for murres, Birkhead discovered, the greatest concentration of pores is around the egg’s large, blunt end that is raised above the ground by the downward-angled tip. This protects it from the contaminated ledge. By surveying almost 100 eggs, Birkhead also found that murres had more pores at the blunt end compared to the Razorbill, their closest relative, whose nesting habitat is typically less toxic and grubby. That strengthens the idea that the pointed tip makes these eggs especially suited to the jam-packed nesting sites where murres breed. “Nobody else before had really noticed this business of the dirt being a major selective force on [murre] eggs,” Birkhead says.