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It may be that egg color is irrelevant to survival, so that experiments have correctly failed to reject the null hypothesis. Alternatively, the failure to detect a coloration effect could be related to commonly used aspects of experimental design. By examining the available literature (Table 1), we observed that the studies in which eggs were painted show no effect of egg color on predation risk, whereas the reverse is true of studies that used naturally colored eggs (but see Montevecchi 1976b). These observations suggest that the painting of eggs may not be an appropriate experimental procedure. Among studies that used naturally pigmented eggs, opposite findings, e.g., "positive" (Yahner and Mahan 1996) or "negative" (Jobin and Picman 1997), are difficult to resolve because the authors used different experimental designs such as the number of eggs per nest and type of habitat. In addition, some of the experiments were conducted using eggs of different size and color simultaneously. Because egg size influences egg predation (Montevecchi 1976b), the interpretation of the influence of color per se is obscure. There is a clear need for further experiments to test whether egg color influences egg predation in ground-nesting birds. Therefore, we examined the effect of egg color in a ground-nesting species, the red-legged partridge, Alectoris rufa. We used natural eggs of this species, taking advantage of the fact that partridges are farm-raised, making it possible to obtain...

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