Backyard Nesting Birds of Ontario: 28 Life-Size Egg STL Files + Digital Display Posters

A complete backyard egg collection, ready to print and paint

Most of us have found one: a robin’s egg in the grass, a broken blue shell under the hedge. This set brings together the eggs of the 28 birds most likely to nest in an Ontario backyard, so you can recreate the whole neighbourhood at true size and paint each one by hand.

It’s made for hobbyists and collectors who enjoy the slow work of painting something real. The eggs range from the pale, speckled Black-capped Chickadee to the scrawled Baltimore Oriole and the deep blue-green Gray Catbird. Finished as a set, they make a striking display in a shadow box, on a shelf, or nestled on the poster that comes with them.

Measured from real eggs, not guessed

Each egg is modelled from the average length and width of real specimens, not a single photo or a rough estimate.

• 24 of the 28 eggs use averages from Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds, published by the Smithsonian’s U.S. National Museum. Bent’s figures average measured museum eggs, from 40 to 400 per species. Together, the eggs in this set are based on about 2,400 measured eggs.
• 1 egg (Eastern Phoebe) comes from Charles Bendire’s Life Histories of North American Birds (1895), the work Bent’s series built on.
• 3 eggs (European Starling, Rose-breasted Grosbeak and House Sparrow) use typical dimensions from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds.

Size is only half of it. Some eggs are almost round, like the hummingbird’s and the chickadee’s. Others taper to a point, or carry their widest point near the blunt end. The shape of every egg is drawn with the SaviMade egg generator, a mathematical egg-shape model tuned for each species, so the profile matches the size.

The 28 species

Blue Jay · Mourning Dove · European Starling · American Crow · Common Grackle · American Robin · Gray Catbird · Hairy Woodpecker · Northern Cardinal · Northern Flicker · Red-winged Blackbird · Rose-breasted Grosbeak · Baltimore Oriole · Barn Swallow · Eastern Phoebe · Song Sparrow · House Sparrow · Cedar Waxwing · Eastern Bluebird · Downy Woodpecker · White-breasted Nuthatch · House Finch · Ruby-throated Hummingbird · American Goldfinch · Chipping Sparrow · Tree Swallow · House Wren · Black-capped Chickadee

The smallest is the Ruby-throated Hummingbird, at 12.9 × 8.5 mm. The largest is the American Crow, at 41.4 × 29.1 mm.

The bonus: two editions of the poster

The set includes the artwork for the Backyard Nesting Birds of Ontario poster, as print-ready vector PDFs in two editions:

• Silhouette edition: clean grey outlines of every egg at true relative size, with a numbered key.
• Illustrated edition: every egg digitally-illustrated by Lincoln Savi with its simulated colours and markings. It’s a useful painting reference, and lovely framed on its own.

Each edition comes in two sizes:

• 18 × 24 in, with eggs at 2.5× life size, for framing.
• 8.5 × 11 in, with eggs at exact life size, so your painted eggs can sit right on their matching outlines.

What’s included

• 28 STL files, one per species, named by species and dimensions. Every egg prints at 1:1 scale with no resizing.
• A README listing each egg’s poster number, common and scientific name, and dimensions.
• 4 poster PDF files: silhouette and illustrated editions, each at 18 × 24 in and 8.5 × 11 in.

We like to print egg models in white resin on an LCD 3D printer using these settings:

• Layer height: 0.05mm
• Hollowed: True
  • Wall thickness: 2mm
  • Infill: 10%
  • 2-3mm drainage holes on the top and bottom of the egg.

Feel free to use these settings as a guide or use your own preferred settings. They’re just the settings that we used when printing.

Due to the nature of resin printing, you will have to determine your own exposure settings because they are different for every brand of resin and printer.