Fabergé nest?

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Nest of a ruby-throated hummingbird in a sycamore tree.

Ruby-throated hummingbird nests are exquisitely crafted, as delicate and finely detailed as the Fabergé eggs once produced for the Emperors of Russia. Oddly, the tsars have not survived but many of the fragile eggs have, which brings to mind the question: What is more enduring, politics or art? (I've always put my energies into the latter. Few remember the polices of President Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson but the work of their contemporaries, 1950s artists Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, live on.)

Back to the birds: To build a nest, ruby-throats use spider silk and plant fibers, decorating the finished assemblages with flakes of lichen. Sometimes you need an extra pair or two of sharp eyes to locate a hummer's nest, as we had on an Ijams canoe trip a few years ago on Mead's Quarry Lake. Click: hummer nest.

Rose Trellis egg 
created by jeweler
Peter Carl Fabergé in 1907
for Tsar Nicholas II

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