Eggs and egg-collecting

All paintings from 1900

15 May 1896, Westgate
I went to Quex birds-nesting. In a yew, placed neatly in a fork of a lowish bush is a frail, but well-built, nest of a blackcap. It is composed of principally fine grass (dead and dry) with a few horsehairs for a lining. The brown-headed little mother slips almost silently off as you approach, she being never a close sitter, and as she does so reveals three brown-blotched eggs.
          On returning later I am surprised to find that the male has taken charge of the nest, the velvet black head being unmistakeable besides the brighter colour of the remainder of his plumage. He sat closer than the female.

          In the same plantation, in fact in almost the next bush, is a linnet’s nest containing several young, the necks of which are all bulged out with the food they have lately received.

          The whole of this year I have not taken an egg.

Later he assembled a reference collection to aid his studies of nests and nestlings. He never a collector of eggs in the way of some Victorian and later “oologists” with their long series of eggs of each species, with minor variations in colour or markings.

28 May, 1900, Westgate
I watched two baby greenfinches leave the eggshell today. In both cases the egg was broken in a more or less zone around the broadest part, the tiny occupants at every breath expanding themselves as much as possible, using, I think, their limbs at the same time. The egg, as far as I have seen, is always cracked in a small hole in this portion of the shell and is afterwards divided into two pieces, separating in a circle running through the hole first made by the egg-tooth. In a plover’s nest this year I found the eggs all broken at this place and at the same time (about mid-day).

He returned to this subject seventy years later after observations made on a visit to Sea Cow Island (page …).