The eggs that retail at £264 a dozen

If you think you need more for your eggs then perhaps you should re-think the kind of bird you are keeping.

Margaret Dover, for example, is picking up £17 an egg for her free range output. But then we are talking about an egg that is five inches long and weighs 600 grams. Because Margaret’s Leicestershire based flock consists entirely of emus. Ten of them to be exact.

And although the egg price is phenomenal output is not that great. Your average emu lays between 20 and 50 eggs a year but crams those into a six month season between November and May. So no egg picking in the summer then. And if pullet prices are a touch on the high side, £40 at a week old, then you do not have to worry about the spent emu issue for around 20 years.

According to Margaret they eat just about anything. Consumers get an egg with a creamy but pale yolk and a very soft textured white which can be used entirely like a hen’s egg. One scrambled emu egg will serve six people. The only drawback is there is no such thing as doing a quick boiled egg if you are buying emu. To hard boil one egg takes an hour and forty-five minutes.

Margaret also sells the avocado coloured eggs with the inside sucked out as a novelty or to be decorated for £12 each. If she decorates them herself—by cutting through the outer green colour to reveal the pale blue underneath—they can command a price of up to £38.50.

In the top London store Fortnum and Mason a complete emu egg will cost you £22. The store also sells ostrich eggs and gulls eggs.

Gulls eggs are collected from nesting sites around the country, including Northern Ireland. There is even an annual lunch in the City of London at which 1,800 gull eggs are consumed. London restaurants pay £1.70 each for their gulls eggs and Michel Roux gets through 600 a week at his Gavroche restaurant in Mayfair where a gulls egg with caviar costs £50. Anyone for Britain’s first free range gull flock?