Modern-day Audubon uses art an

By Pam Sohn

Like a modern-day John James Audubon, C.E. Blevins uses art to celebrate what he sees as nature's wonder -- bird eggs.

"I have loved bird eggs since I was 4 years old," said the 84-year-old retired minister, missionary and art teacher. "Now I'm the only man in the world who lays eggs, so far as I know."

In the past 20 years, Mr. Blevins, of Apison, has sculpted and painted 25,000 to 35,000 clay eggs -- perfect replicas of the real eggs of more than 1,200 bird species.

Creating the likenesses of everything from pea-sized hummingbird eggs to 13-inch-long elephant bird eggs, Mr. Blevins has become very good at his hobby-turned-craft. His eggs and his teaching skills have been used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in teaching programs, said UTC's Dr. David Aborn.

"The eggs are extremely accurate," said Dr. Aborn, ornithologist of the department of biological and environmental sciences at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a board member of the C.E. Blevins Avian Learning Center.

The center is a museum for the massive folk-art egg collection. Mr. Blevins' chanel new bags family opened the Cohutta, Ga., facility to honor the educator and his one-of-a-kind craft and to help visitors learn about birds and art. The museum is open by reservation to group tours, said Joel Blevins, son of the artist.

Elementary and middle school students receive a biology lesson, tour the museum and participate in an art project, the younger Mr. Blevins said.

"It sounds goofy when you call somebody and say, 'I have an egg museum,'" he said, adding that people often brush him off when he tries to tout the unique effort or solicit help. "There's a virtual egg museum in Canada, but they don't have real replicas, and they don't have 1,200 species."

He said the study of eggs, called oology, has a speckled past thanks to early researchers and collectors whose zeal to take eggs contributed even to the extinction of at least one bird: the great auk.

Now it is illegal to collect either the real eggs or the real nests of wild birds without a federal permit.

The difficulty of real egg collection and their fragility in displays all added to the elder Mr. Blevins' drive to re-create nature, his son said. And what began for his father as a hobby art project soon became something more.

"Dad wanted to make eggs out of clay so kids could hold them," the younger Mr. Blevins said. "You can tell a lot about the species just by looking at the eggs."

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Cavity nesters' eggs are always white because inside the holes in trees the eggs don't need camouflage and the parent bird needs to be able to find them in the dark, he said. On the other hand, field birds' eggs are colored like their nesting areas or their nests, and coastal birds' eggs are shaped differently to roll around a circle if they are disturbed or windblown, so they won't get away from the parent.

Often at the museum, the artist's grandson, Zachary Reynolds, of Atlanta, is the presenter, and the elder Mr. Blevins said he has taught Mr. Reynolds, 34, and also an artist, all he knows about making the eggs and understanding them.

"I think it's wonderful how he's taken all these resources and become a master at this," Mr. Reynolds said of his grandfather. "We want to share this collection with children to help t
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