I feel quite ashamed that as a youngster I and so many others used to collect different birds eggs take them home, make a hole in both ends and blow the yolk out and place it in a collecting box to gloat over. The unspoken rule was to only ever take one egg and not to tell other young collectors where the nest was.
Needless to say it was easy to find common
birds nests but much harder to find rarer birds nests such as those birds of
prey or hibernating birds that had flown in from many hundreds of miles away to
nest safely away from higher or lower temperatures so that rearing of the
chicks was easier.
Seabirds nests were difficult to find as
they often chose nesting sites that only they could access…unless we had wings
of course. However being young we concentrated on the birds close to home and
exchanged eggs with those friends that may have swaps as you might too as
exploring boys could find unbroken eggs removed from nests by other creatures
and cuckoos that checked other birds nest. Cuckoos were of course lazy by
leaving the incubating and hatching to other birds. When the cuckoo chicks
hatched it didn’t take long before its instinct told them to kick the other
eggs out whilst their parents continued to feed the big cuckoo chick even though
there was only one left.
Hopefully egg collecting is much less of a
hobby than it was in my day; whereas collecting photographs of local birds and annual visitors
is far more worthwhile. Far better is
taking pictures of these wild creatures as you endeavor to capture shots of every bird
in the country. There are usually a few birds that are almost always difficult
to locate, so your list of sightings never quite reaches 100%!
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Image found at www.pixabay.com
I can see it would be interesting, but yes, it's best to leave the nests alone. I think collecting butterflies is pretty horrid too! Such beautiful creatures pinned to a board...
ReplyDeleteI grew up with only two parents and a sister five years younger than me. Our closest neighbor was almost a mile away and both of them were my cousins. We didn't play with each other so the birds were fairly safe. I was a good shot with my BB Gun but didn't very much use birds as targets. Mom's cats ate any that I killed and left laying in the grove.
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Sadly, I remember smashing bird eggs that I found as a chid. Apparently both you and I have grown wiser and more compassionate as we have aged.
ReplyDeleteWe didn't collect eggs but collected nests--not knowing that while some birds (the dirtier ones) never reuse old nests, others always want to reuse old nests and won't stay in the same place next year if the old nest is gone. (There was little useful information in most of the nature books of my childhood. They filled in speculation about how species evolved to cover up the space left by how much had not yet been learned about how species actually live.)
ReplyDeleteI remember tearing down sparrow nests in the hay loft of our barn. Today's children are likely inside watching TV!
ReplyDeleteInteresting hobby, I did some similar things back in the day...but times change. Good true story Old Egg.
ReplyDeleteI collected neither eggs nor nests. My mother warned me not to touch them and to respect birds. However, I often picked up the cracked eggs that feel from nests and marvelled at how delicate they are.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's a thing kids do any more. People in general were more ignorant back then about the dangers of extinction and the importance of biodiversity (to us along with other species). My parents and grandparents were unusually conservationist. I remember my Dad showing me a nest with eggs in, lifting me up to see. I marvelled at the delicate colour (pale blue) and at how tiny they were. But we were taught not to actually disturb a nest if we should find one.
ReplyDeleteYou paired this poem with a wonderful photo. I have only seen robin eggs, and I marveled over them.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if cats also collect birds, the way people collected their eggs ~
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