bolivianbaby

Our doves lay 4-5 infertile eggs a week. I thought it might be a fun artsy project to paint them.

However, how do we get the inside part out of the egg so they don't get stinky?

Tigerlily

Here's a site with directions:
http://www.creativekidsathome.com/ac...vity_131.shtml

Be sure to take some pictures... sounds as though you all could have lots of fun.

bolivianbaby

Thank you so much, Tigerlily!

Tana

My budgies and cockatiels used to lay infertile eggs all the time. I kept most of them intact and don't ever recall that they had a smell to them. Eventually the innards dried up and I used them for decorations here and there. I dunno about dove eggs and how large they get though and if smell would be a factor.

Tony G.

what we do on festivals and carnivals, we take regular eggs, crack the top of it (just the top, make sure they shell doesnt break) and just flip it over, and let the yolk fall into a bowl. Then with water Just rinse the isnide of the egg. Let it dry. Then what we do is we fill them up with confetti and cover the top with colorful paper. Then we paint the eggs. And the day of the festival we hit eachother with the eggs and get full of confetti

just thought i would share hehe

sirdarksol

With chicken eggs, you don't have to empty them. My family does onion-skin eggs and Ukrainian eggs, and we've never emptied them. They just eventually dry out.
With the thinner shell of a dove's egg, it may be a good idea to give the dove eggs a good coat of lacquer after they're painted. That should make them more difficult to break, too.

If anyone in your house has a particularly steady hand and artistic bent, you may want to look into doing some dove eggs Ukrainian-style.
For those who haven't seen how this is done, you use a stylus filled with wax to draw a pattern on the egg, and then dye it a light color (or just dye without the wax for the first step). Once the dye is dry, overlay another pattern on the egg, and dye it a slightly darker color. Repeat this, with the final color often being black (though my dad has a really neat magenta one that he did). Once the final dye job is dry, heat the eggs in an oven or over a candle and use a towel (paper or otherwise) to remove the wax. The result is an intricate pattern of colors.
I think that this would look amazing on dove's eggs (and I suddenly want to get my hands on an ostritch egg for this, too. )

Meenu

Cascarones! We do that here - San Antonio has a 10-day celebration every year called Fiesta. There are cascarones everywhere.

bolivianbaby

The confetti idea sounds cool! Thanks, Tony!

So do you think the dove eggs would be fine without emptying them?

We get so many eggs, I feel bad throwing them out. I found one in the food dish the other day One of my next projects is to set up a couple dove-happy nests.

sirdarksol

I think they would do alright with the lacquer.
I know that, with my family, the first year that the eggs are painted/dyed, we would always put them somewhere they could be seen, but would be less likely to be disturbed. They'd then be carefully put away for the year (this was an Easter thing, for us). By the next year, there's not much left in them to smell too terrible. We know this because one of our cats decided that he liked the old eggs, and would break them open.

bolivianbaby

That sounds good to me! Oh, this is going to be such a fun project for us! I may just turn it over to my daughter. I'll let her do the painting and I'll do the hard stuff. She'll have so much fun and she's a MUCH better artist than I am.

Thank you so much for your help!

gremlin

It actually depends on the egg (if you need to empty them). My quail eggs would have to be emptied because otherwise they have a tendency to explode and stink. The finch eggs, on the other hand, dry up without any problem at all. Dove eggs would be large enough to blow. I use a safety pin to poke the holes in the two ends. A corsage pin also works well with the added benefit of being long enough to stir up the yolk. Breaking the yolk in the egg makes it easier to blow. Then just blow the egg into a bowl (scrambled egg for breakfast - yum!) and gently rinse the inside of the egg. If you really wanted to, you could get some plaster of paris and mix it thin enough to squirt into the egg with a syringe. Bird feeding syringes work pretty well for this since they have a small enough tip to fit into the end of the egg and still have a large enough opening to let the plaster of paris flow well. I do this with chicken eggs sometimes. Cover the small hole with a piece of scotch tape or some plastic, then squirt the plaster of paris in through the larger hole. It will dry and can be smoothed to match the surface of the egg. Once it is done, you can't really tell which is which.

bolivianbaby

Gremlin, are you saying we can eat them as well? I'm not trying to sound dumb, but I never thought about that.

gremlin

Oh yes. Since they are where you can collect them on a daily basis, yes. Just take them out once a day (or even every 2-3 days) and stick them in your fridge until you have enough to make an omelette or scrambled eggs or fried eggs or whatever. You could even do boiled eggs and have teeny tiny little deviled eggs for a fancy party. If you want to use them in cooking, you would have to figure out how many of the dove eggs would equal a chicken egg - probably about 5-7 dove eggs - but yes, they can be used just like eggs from the store. In fact, they could actually be considered "organic" since you are not feeding your doves growth hormones and stuff.

Meenu

I don't have anything to add, I just want to say that I am finding this thread very interesting. Thanks for starting it, BB.

bolivianbaby

Sweet! Okay, let me take this one step further (for you Meenu)-let's say I make scrambled or boiled eggs with them...can I use the shells to put in the tank that has my daughter's snails in it for calcium? If so, is there anything else I should be feeding them to make the shells more nutritious?

I'm still going to blow out several, make scrambled eggs with them, and save the shells for my daughter the artist, but she'll eventually get bored with it.

sirdarksol

Sorry. I meant to mention that you can eat them, too. I don't think there are any bird's eggs that are bad for you.
Yep, bird's egg shells make great calcium supplements. I use baked, crushed egg shells for calcium in my home-made catfood. As long as the doves are getting proper nutrition that they don't get sick from laying eggs, I don't think there's anything else you can do. The eggs are pretty much just calcium. No worries there.

bolivianbaby

This is cool! It's like having really cute, sweet, soft, QUIET chickens!

And we can recycle or create something out of everything! That's just neat!

gremlin

Your crafty daughter could always use the blown dove eggs to make earrings to sell . . . Paint them (or carve them) and use a bit of hot glue to glue them onto the french wire type earrings. Coating them with shellac would make them a bit more durable. She could even add a few shed dove feathers. They could make fairly nice gifts or even sell them at a craft fair.

bolivianbaby

That's an awesome idea, Gremlin! She likes to "sell" things at her grandmother's art shows. That would be a really cool thing for her.

gremlin

Just make sure to take lots of pictures of her creations! Hmm, maybe we should have a section on here for crafty-ness.