This man spent the last years of his life creating more than 1,000 replica eggs

C.E. Blevins was an art teacher and avid birdwatcher who combined the skills of his hobby and vocation to sculpt beautiful, lifelike bird eggs that he painted to perfectly replicate real eggs upon which they were based.

“When Dad was in his late 70s or early 80s, about 10 years before he died, he wanted to make every bird’s egg in the world,” says Lydia Blevins Reynolds, his daughter. “He worked for years making exact replicas of eggs. Most are made of clay. He’d fire them and paint them. People couldn’t tell the real thing from the fake eggs.”

Blevins created the eggs of more than 1,100 species of birds before his death in 2011. The Blevins family has entrusted the family’s’s priceless collection to the Chattanooga Audubon Society, which has displayed them in an exhibit in Walker Hall at Audubon Acres.

Called the C.E. Blevins Avian Jewels Collection, the exhibit opens to the public Saturday, March 19, at 1 p.m. To celebrate the occasion, admission fees to the East Brainerd nature sanctuary have been waived for the day. There will be birds of prey shows throughout the day, children’s activities such as face painting and egg painting, and members of the Blevins family will be on hand to answer questions about their dad’s work.

Son Joel Blevins says the collection began in earnest after his wife found the book “Birds of North America” and gave it to her father-in-law in 1998.

“He replicated 750 species of eggs from that book,” says Blevins. “Then he found another book that had specifications for world bird species, and he made another 400 or so from it.

“What got him into it was that he knew people had negatively impacted bird populations by collecting their eggs. His experience in the classroom had also taught him that kids really needed to touch things; that’s how they learned. So his goal was to make a replica collection of bird eggs. Kids could make the connection as if they were real eggs, and if they broke one he could make another.”

The collection was first displayed in Cohutta, Ga. at the C.E. Blevins Avian Learning Center, a nonprofit Joel Blevins and his father operated until it closed two years ago. The eggs were kept in storage as the family looked for a place willing to use the collection for educational purposes. Audubon Acres and the Audubon Society seemed a perfect fit.

The eggs are displayed on 50 shelves – from the tiniest ruby-throated hummingbird eggs to the largest egg of the elephant bird, a species now extinct. C.E. Blevins even replicated nests so eggs could be displayed as they were in the wild. During educational sessions, the eggs can be pulled from the shelves according to habitats, such as shore birds, so people associate certain species with their specific environments.

“It makes me really happy they can be appreciated now,” says Joel Blevins. “It’s a very rare collection. No one else has ever replicated this many eggs. There are taxidermists who can replicate eggs, but nobody has done so on such a large scale.”

Contact Susan Pierce at spierce@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6284.