oh thank heavens

i bought this egg at a flea market in reykjavic, without thinking about it, and when i got home, i looked it up and saw that it was a guillemot egg, which i thought was unbelievably cool, and that didn’t even factor in the pure aesthetic shiver of all those fudge colored spots crowding into an almost liquid stain at the blunt end of the egg. then a day or so latter, I suddenly i froze. i raced to my computer in the middle of doing the dishes, pulled up google, and typed in “guillemot endangered,” only to learn that the guillemot or common murre is a species “of least concern,” with its population increasing. i went back to do the dishes, infinitely reassured, that i had not just bought the last egg of the dodo bird.

icelandic guillemot (murre) bird egg (Uria aalge)