"Forbidden Gems"

     Confronted by the age-old question; ‘’which came first, the chicken or the egg’’, the answer for me is simple – the egg of course!  All my life I’ve been fascinated by the natural world, but interest in ornithology did not really bloom until I was in the 7th grade in a small rural school outside of Barrie, Ontario. There I heard tell of a classmate who had an egg collection. I’d never seen an egg collection but somehow the thought of making one piqued my curiosity. So I sought out the boy in question, introduced myself and asked if it would be possible to see his collection. He in turn invited me to his home where he proudly presented his avian treasures to my wide-eyed astonishment. The collection was a modest one, but neatly arranged with the eggs set in cedar saw dust in old cigar boxes.  The meeting that day would cement a life-long friendship with my old pal, John Moore and seeing the variety and natural beauty of those eggs lit a fire in me that still burns bright nearly fifty years later.
    Something we learned quickly was that not only was it taboo to collect bird eggs, it was forbidden by law: thus the title for this series. That redirected our interests from collecting eggs to collecting data on the nests we discovered. I began submitting carefully collected data on bird nests to the Royal Ontario Museum nest record program. The fulfillment of contributing to such a project supplanted the desire to collect eggs and the real challenge became studying bird behavior and grasping a notion of habitat diversity -- getting to know where and how to look.
    Aside from the satisfaction of depicting the inherent beauty of such a collection, I thought it would be of interest to show some of nature’s most beautiful objects that we rarely have the opportunity to observe. Partly because of their fragile nature and because museums do not want to inadvertently stimulate illegal collecting, egg collections are typically housed ‘’out of sight -- out of mind’’.  Egg collecting went out of fashion following peak years from the late 1800’s to about 1930.  At one time price lists existed for egg collectors with the rarest species demanding the highest prices. In the 1800’s, the princely sum of $350.00 would purchase a California condor egg. Well known Peregrine falcon nest sites were systematically robbed year after year so that some pairs were never able to fledge young. One can well imagine the sorts of problems this could pose. 
    The eggs represented here are depicted at life size. They are a small remnant of a collection assembled by old time museum collectors with some eggs being dated from the late 1800’s.  When I worked at the Wye Marsh Wildlife Center in 1974, I spent many hours of my spare time cleaning and organizing an old collection that had been donated to the center. There were hundreds of eggs with many rarities and complete clutches. Years later when visiting the wildlife center, I spotted the tall oak cabinet that housed the eggs. I was anxious to revisit the collection but was extremely disappointed to find that it had been pretty much destroyed. What had taken many thousands of hours of dedicated field work to build now lay mostly in ruins. Many eggs were simply gone; sets were broken up with many eggs reduced to shattered fragments. Such a collection is practically irreplaceable today and it was disturbing to see that it had been subjected to such abuse. Sadly I did not photograph the collection when it was in a pristine state!
Of the more than 8,000 to 10,000 species of birds existing today, some still remain a mystery with their eggs yet unseen by human eyes. As a critical component of bird biology, the study of eggs and collections will continue to be important elements in understanding how birds adapt -- or not -- to ever changing environments.
    Simply, my intent here is to illustrate the intrinsic visual beauty and symmetry of bird eggs, to show their immense diversity and infinite patterns, to enrich and inspire the imagination. Each egg is like a finger print in that no two are exactly alike. Within the confines of their structural limits, they each truly represent nature’s hand at abstract art.