Taking risks, burning calories, and losing water to get a small amount of food
From BearWiki
Claim: Bear wastes energy, water, and risks his neck for very little payoff in climbing to get a couple small bird eggs.
Bear often seems to have his survival priorities all wrong and always feels the need to make some unreasonable climb. In the Moab Desert episode, Bear decides to scale a cliff to get a two small bird eggs (perhaps the size of quail eggs)[1], burning calories and wasting precious water as sweat in the process.
A quail egg has 14 calories, from one gram of fat and 1.2 grams of protein[]. That's less than 30 calories given for this climb. Even if you pretend that they're of a more nutritious variety (like you get from more domesticated birds) -- let's say, the two tiny eggs combined are like one large chicken egg. That's ~73 calories.[2]
Let's say that Bear is 180 pounds and had to climb for half an hour to get those eggs and get back down (realistically, it was probably more than that) -- 15 minutes up, and 15 minutes down. Let's be nice and call his descent a rappell, even though in the wilderness, it would be as exhausting as the climb. We find that he would burn 236 calories on the ascent and 171 on the descent, for a grand total of 407 calories[3]. That is, to say, between 5 1/2 and 14 1/2 times as many calories to get the eggs as he got from them.
Even more critical, in the desert, is water loss. If you're not sitting by a reliable water source, and especially if you venture into an unknown area, water is your lifeline. When you run out, you may have as little as a few hours to live. Physical exercise (especially in the daytime) causes you to sweat, which makes you lose water much faster. While the eggs have water in them, eggs that small aren't going to be a significant water supply, and digesting food costs water.
As for the calcium excuse, that doesn't hold any water. And none of this even factors into the danger associated with it. Remember: your odds of getting rescued when lost are extremely good -- if you don't go and do something stupid like get yourself killed or maimed while trying to get a couple tiny raw eggs from the top of a cliff.
