Birds Nesting and Egg Collecting. J. G. Black
your neck.) Otherwise don’t have an egg in your collection unless you have found, or at any rate seen the nest yourself. Every egg in your collection should remind you of the nest it came from, the bird that laid it, the search for it, the finding of it, and all sorts of pleasant things. Eggs that don’t remind you of anything at all are not a collection; you might just as well have Seebohm’s book with the beautiful coloured plates, or an album of stamps given you by your big brother when he got tired of it. Quite nice things to have, both of them, but not to be compared with a collection of eggs that you have found for yourself.
Don’t be in too much of a hurry to get all the eggs there are. The season may be short, but there are plenty more coming, and it is good to have something to look forward to. The finest thing in the whole business is finding a new nest that you haven’t found before, and the harder it is to find, and the longer you have to wait for it, the greater the pleasure when it does come. So don’t be too ready to let kind people show you nests, and do everything except climb the tree for you (I have known them even do that); for you never get the same fun out of it as when you do it all yourself.
One more don’t, and that is, don’t take on trust everything you read in this book or any other. It’s probably true, but the oldest of us has not done learning about birds yet, and there’s no harm and lots of good in seeing for yourself. Your long-tailed tit may have a different way of getting into her nest from mine, and in any case it’s a sight worth seeing. Again the way nests are built and what they are made of are things you should be careful to notice; and anything you have found out for yourself is always better than what you get from a book. So take this book as meant to give you an idea of what to look out for, and not as the last word on the subject.
$ 7. THE EGG COLLECTION.
Suppose you have taken all my advice, found lots of eggs and brought them home safely. The next thing is to blow them, and a little more advice will perhaps save you some breakages and disappointments. When you start to blow an egg, hold it by the ends between your finger and thumb, for it is stronger that way, and do the whole business over water, so that if you drop it there’s no harm done. Get a good drill, and use it on eggs that don’t matter much till you are pretty sure of yourself. Bore the hole where the egg will naturally balance on it, and opposite to any markings that you particularly want to show. Don’t try to blow eggs with too small a hole, and don’t shove the point of the blowpipe right inside. If yon keep it just outside, the air goes in just as well and the contents come out much better, and you will never burst the egg. Having emptied the egg, squirt in some water, shake it up and blow it out again; and keep on doing this till it comes out as clean as it went in. Wipe the outside lightly with a wet handkerchief, just to remove the dirt but none of the markings, and put it hole-downwards on a piece of blotting-paper to drain. If a yellow stain appears, or the egg tries to stick to the paper, wash it out again.
Now your egg will keep for ever (?), and if you keep a note-book, you can number each nest as you enter it, and put the same number on the egg, just beside the hole; so that you can look it up at any time and find out where it came from, and all about it.
There are two good ways of keeping your eggs. One is to lay them on cotton-wool in a box or cabinet, and the great point about this is that you can easily rearrange them as new ones are added, and keep them in their proper families. The other way is to stick each egg on a card with its number in the corner; the cards can be mounted in cases or drawers, stuck on with paper hinges such as you use for stamps, only bigger, and the cases covered with glass. Your eggs are quite safe once you have got them in, you can see them very well and their numbers too, and they look very neat. In fact there is no better way of showing eggs. The drawback is that when you add to your collection, unless you have left a lot of spaces (and you can never tell just how many specimens of any bird’s eggs you will have) you probably have to unship the whole lot to get them in their places, and it is very easy to break a few in taking them off.
If your eggs are quite clean inside and kept where the light cannot get at them, most of them will keep their colour as long as you like to keep them.
$ 8. THE NOTE-BOOK.
Every naturalist should keep a note-book for two good reasons. The first is that your memory plays funny tricks, and lets all sorts of useful things slip; and even brings facts out at times quite different from when they went in. If you have ever heard fishermen talking about the good old days of their youth you will know what I mean. Now, experience is the thing to help you on with your hobby more than anything; and you lose a good deal of it and get rather hazy about a good deal more, unless you have the facts to look up, just as you wrote them down at the time. You can’t possibly remember such things as the dates when you found this bird or that, and the longer you go on the more useful such knowledge becomes.
The second reason is the pleasure you get from looking up old notes, which remind you of all sorts of joys you would otherwise have forgotten, patience rewarded, unexpected bits of luck, narrow escapes, and good times generally. Even the bad days are sometimes good to remember after a year or two.
We will suppose you are going to keep a note-book. The next question is what you are going to put in it. I advise you to put in every nest from which you take an egg, the first nest of each bird each year, any late ones or second broods, and any other that has anything specially interesting about it.
Your notes are easier to look up if you have them in columns, and a good arrangement is—
Date. No. Bird. Eggs. Place. Nest. Remarks.
I should take two pages, and give the whole right-hand page to the “Remarks” column. Here you put the interesting things, such as how you found the nest, how the birds behaved and what happened later, when the eggs hatched, and the young ones flew, in fact, anything. The “Nest” column should be the next biggest, for putting where it was built, what it was made of, and anything else of interest. “Eggs” should be given as fresh, sitting, hard sat, young, and so on; and the number of the entry is most useful, if you number your eggs, as you can turn up No. 6 or No. 293 in a moment, just by the size of the number.
You don’t need to put in your register only nests that have eggs; if you find an uncommon bird with young ones, or even see the family after they have left the nest, the date and place will give you a good idea as to when and where to look for it next year. Many birds, even when they have spent the winter in Africa, will come back to the same little corner of England, and build within a yard or two of their last year’s nest; and if it is in a hole, it is very likely to be in the same hole next year.
In the case of rare birds, any record of their having bred or tried to breed in your neighbourhood is useful. For instance, suppose there is only one Chiff-chaff anywhere near you, and you hear him singing in the same tree all through the nesting season, but never manage to find the nest; if you note down the place, you will not forget to look him up next summer, and perhaps with more success.
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