Why? Part 1

Today I will be examining a question to which I devoted several pages of my dissertation: why did people collect eggs? There's a lot of material here, so the post will be split into two.

I didn't spend a fortnight of all-nighters staring at this view not to mine it for blog material

Systematic egg collecting seems to have grown with the middle classes and the Industrial Revolution, which makes sense. With greater freedom of movement thanks to improvements in transport methods it became much easier to travel to remote collecting areas (or exchange material by mail), and the newly expanded middle classes found themselves with time to devote to their hobbies.

It's important to note, though, that egg hunters weren't all  Some “field men,” such as Denis Kiely, were near-exclusively finders and harvesters of eggs, often selling or giving their finds to others and only maintaining modest collections of their own. Others were “cabinet men,” preferring to acquire their collections through purchase or trade (the scarcity of women in the history of egg collecting will be discussed in another entry). Vivian V.D. Hewitt turned away from personally harvesting eggs, but continued to expand his collection by purchasing through agents, on one occasion handing a fellow collector a signed blank cheque in order to obtain an egg and skin of a great auk. Use of agents was not uncommon; by maintaining envoys in several locations, a collector or dealer was able to receive specimens without ever leaving the comfort of home. The agents might harvest eggs to eat in any case, and would be earning extra for any unusual finds they were able to send back. I found no examples of institutions (as opposed to private individuals) employing agents in Europe, but it appears to have been more commonplace in the United States. During the course of researching my project I found several requests for donations of eggs and skins from various museums, with varying levels of payment promised.

Some day I'd like to find out how many eggs they acquired this way

Some collectors combined their hobby with research, contributing significant understanding to the field of ornithology. Francis Jourdain both personally acquired eggs in the field and accumulated them in his cabinet, and was regarded as a definitive authority on Palearctic birds.

Michael Prynne, mentioned previously on this blog, gave five potential reasons for collecting eggs: financial gain, what he termed collectomania, sport, aesthetic enjoyment and scientific advancement. I adopted this list as a starting point for my research, as I found no other first-hand account for the reasons behind collecting that was quite so exhaustive.

Money

The first motivation Prynne immediately dismissed as not befitting a true collector, being of the belief that money corrupted an otherwise pure pursuit. Those who bought and sold eggs often acted as middlemen, which Prynne found acceptable only in the handling of eggs following the death of a collector. As procurers, however, dealers were often seen as inherently untrustworthy, valuing profit over integrity.

Professional dealing in eggs, while lucrative for some, never progressed into what might be called an industry, largely because of the preference of collectors for dealing with each other. Oological magazines were filled with advertisements for buyers and sellers, whom having exchanged details would then correspond without the need of a middleman. One advisement written in 1920 suggested that “an exchange is, or should be, quite as much an exchange of courtesies as an exchange of specimens” which suggests that collectors preferred their hobby to be a social activity rather than business. Their requirement for accurate records obliged collectors to rely heavily on trust, thus they preferred to build relationships with fellow enthusiasts rather than deal with those who might be more interested in profit than accuracy. Such trust relationships were valued by those who maintained them, not least because they allowed for the exchange of valuable material over extended periods of time and the option to repay “credit” at an undetermined point in the future.



A typical selection from 1886



The Collectomaniac

So money wasn't the primary objective, what about collectomania? Prynne never defined the term precisely, but it covers a lot of ground, from collecting for its own sake to collecting merely to possess. Absent is any sense of practical application: the eggs are not collected to be used (indeed one could say that being collected thwarts their intended purpose). Eggs were like art, they were there to be admired, not to be practical. At the same time, however, he insisted that eggs without a personal connection were worthless. If an egg didn't remind the collector of the joy of collecting it, of the hot summer's day or miserable climb on a cliff face, then it was pointless. To jog memory is arguably a form of utility, and it's worth pointing out that collectors like Hewitt would have disagreed with Prynne, if their substantial purchased collections are any clue.

An important part of collectomania is the notion of completeness, a central facet of which was variation. A complete collection of stamps, for example, is theoretically possible. Difficult, time-comsuming and monumentally expensive, but as Prynne writes, varieties of man-made items are known, or known not to exist: the limits of philately are expansive but delineated and potentially reachable (with the obvious exception of those no longer extant). Natural objects, by contrast, are highly variable: any collector might happen upon something completely singular. Theoretically infinite variety forever leaves open the possibility of discovering something new, rare or unique. To a near-pathologically acquisitive personality this is not disheartening, in fact just the opposite.

The Foucaultian notion of sameness-in-difference states that to be collectable a series of objects must exhibit variety within essential similarity. Different colours of stamps, different inscriptions on medals, different registration numbers on trains, varieties of bus ticket or paperclip, these are all inherently collectable because they are variations on a theme. Eggs too are variations on a theme, and thanks to Linnaean taxonomy they can be neatly classified. Susan Pearce wrote that “collections must have limits” but it might be more apt to suggest that collections must have milestones. Oologists collected by species and so in theory they might reach a point where they possessed an egg of every variety of bird (assuming for a moment that clear speciation is in fact possible). But they also collected by colour, year, location, and a host of other considerations. Eggs of unusual colouration, markings or shape were particularly prized, even from common species. Under such conditions, there would always be a reason to acquire another clutch, and there were those whose collectomania drove them to preoccupation.



Not that I'd know anything about that

This kind of motivation is perhaps one of the most familiar to the public, as it was the single-minded obsessives who came to attention when they kept collecting once it become illegal. People like Colin Watson, who continued to pursue his hobby after multiple arrests and a raid on his home. It was the avarice of men like Watson that gave egg collecting its low reputation today, or indeed when Prynne wrote in 1963:

It is such extremists who add the last straw to the disreptutation now accorded to all oölogists. Fortunately there are comparatively few of them, but these few have turned need into greed; collectomania into kleptomania; possession into obsession. It is little short of a psychosis in these exceptional cases, and, like the drug-addict, the victim is not to be easily thwarted.

Harsh words, and probably written with more than a little bitterness. It's worth pointing out, though, that the collectomaniacs of today are statistically different from the egg collectors from the days of legitimacy. They are typically working class (at least, the ones who get caught) and this slip in demographic suggests that the modern collectors see egg collecting as a path to self-respectability. By emulating a formerly respectable hobby they might become respected themselves. Or perhaps in maintaining control over a collection, by ordering it a they see fit, those who feel powerless might gain some measure of control over their lives or the world.

Looking at collecting is a fascinating subject in itself, and a much bigger one than my dissertation or this blog was set up to handle. Collecting has been characterised as a kind of illness, as consumption, as a form of control freakery, and collectors aren't always the clearest in explaining their own motives. I could write a book (and people have) on motives behind it; egg collecting is simply an exemplar of behaviour that is found all across humanity.

Thanks for reading folks, next time I'll have a report on how things are doing as far as the egg project itself is concerned. Yes, despite graduating, I'm still happily cataloguing away.

These probably won't be of much scientific use

That time I tried to blow an egg

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Do enough reading on a subject and sooner or later you start to wonder what it would be like to have a go (this is also, coincidentally, why I'd like to have a go at breeding dragonflies). Unfortunately I lack the specialised tools to make a proper job of egg-blowing, the drills and pipes of the collectors' heyday were relatively precise instruments and while there are plenty still around, I don't think anyone would appreciate me absconding with them. With that in mind, I had to improvise.



The scattershot approach

To a collector, the final appearance of the egg was paramount, so they generally made every attempt to choose a bland spot to drill without any interesting marking. During the project I saw one or two with holes on an end, but almost all are somewhere on the sides of the egg. I didn't find any sources explaining why drilling at the points was uncommon, but I suspect it is due to the robust shape of most eggs.

For my own effort, none of the eggs were particularly special to look at, so I selected an arbitrary point on the side. Unfortunately my initial attempt didn't work so well. Chemically speaking eggshells are quite rigid; while strong, they tend to shatter and avoiding that is quite tricky. None of the tools on that penknife were suitably deft.

The subtle approach

Counterintuitive it may be, but the serrations on this knife were very handy for scoring a mark for the "drilling." I don't know if scoring the shell was standard practice among the collectors of old, certainly none of the contemporary guides I read mentioned it. That said, some of the eggs in The Hunterian bear some scratches around the drill hole (exit hole? Blowhole?) which would fit the pattern. I marked an X and started twisting the point of the knife in to make an indent.

Oops

Ok, that didn't work so well. Those useful serrations got caught in the shell as I drilled deeper and levered a chunk of it off. Oh well, if at first you don't succeed...

Destroy all evidence that you tried

I tried a number of tools this time, in the process educating myself about the relative toughness of the contents of my flat. Cocktail sticks were too soft, drawing pins too narrow, knives too flat... it was a fun time. Having made the scoring point with the knife, I finally found a winner when I tried a metal skewer.

How did I hold the camera?

Of course I could only get away with using such clunking great tools because chicken eggs are rather large and tough, at least compared to many other kinds. Smaller eggs, like robins' for example, are a great deal thinner and more delicate. Michael Prynne, mentioned in the previous post, claimed to keep a large darning needle on him at all times, just in case he espied a worthy addition to his collection.

During the course of my research, most sources suggested that the one-hole method was relatively new, replacing an older two-hole method from the early 19th century onwards. The two-hole method is fairly obvious, you blow in one hole and the contents are ejected through the other. Unless you blow so hard that the albumen can't escape fast enough, there's very little risk of bursting the shell. But it was seen as primitive and aesthetically displeasing by practitioners of the one-hole method, which came to dominate during the golden age of collecting.

It's worth noting that the one-hole method may be several thousand years older than previously suspected. There is evidence that early humans may have used the one-hole method for emptying ostrich eggs, which would certainly have been practical as the eggs were then used to carry water (see the link at the end of this entry for more).

The hole I made wasn't perfect, the skewer is triangular in section and caught on the edges, but it was roughly the right size and didn't shatter the rest of the shell, which for my second attempt ever I was rather pleased with.

Now, for emptying the egg the contents have to be blended a bit, as the yolk holds together quite strongly and is more than capable of blocking a small hole (this same property makes it easy to extract when making meringues, so I'm not complaining). Where the earliest collectors were satisfied with stiff pieces of grass, I made do with an unfolded paperclip.

Maceration!

Once the contents were well whisked, it was time to actually blow the egg. I know! All this and I haven't even gotten to the good part yet.

I experimented with a number of tools for this as well, as I lacked convenient L-shaped tubes. Emptied ballpoint pens were a non-starter and I didn't have any straws. In the end I just rolled up some paper. It worked rather well!

But there was still a problem: I couldn't muster enough air pressure to force the egg contents out. I choose to believe that this was due to the physical limitations of a paper tube, rather than a comment on the strength of my lungs. Early practitioners of the two-hole method often just blew directly into the egg, which doesn't work particularly well with the one-hole method unless you want a mouthful of yolk. In the end I was forced to do what you are never supposed to do and put the tube inside the egg.

The reason you're not supposed to do this is that if you block the hole then the contents of the egg have nowhere to go. So blowing into the egg increases the pressure on the inside, and without anywhere to release that pressure the shell bursts. I gambled that the uneven hole I made would still allow contents to flow out, and as it happens I was right.

Accidental success is the second best kind of success

The principle behind the one-hole method is that air blown into the egg will rise to the top, forcing the contents down and out of the hole. As long as the hole is below the level of the eggy goo (technical term), it should flow easily. Some collectors held their eggs above bowls of water in case of accidentally dropping them, while one Francis Jourdain (a particularly famous oologist) is said to have held eggs directly above his face when emptying them. As several biographers have noted, Jourdain wore a thick beard. Draw your own conclusions.

So anyway, having hollowed the egg, what did I do next? Well, like any good collector, I washed it.

Inside and out

Eggs have to be washed after blowing, if they aren't then residual contents will putrefy, which not only smells terrible but attracts pests. According to at least one source, washing was also supposed to maintain the egg's colour for longer. Professional collectors (that is, people who aren't me) preferred syringes or, especially in the two-hole method, mouth-to-egg water injection.

Once the egg is washed, it's just a matter of leaving it somewhere where the water can drain out, then treating it with an antiparasitic agent. Back in the day, this would have been camphor, tobacco, mercury compounds, cedar wood, any number of lovely little toxins. The very earliest "modern" collectors of the mid nineteenth century often treated the nests as well, so that the eggs might be stored in their original home (nest collecting, though less common, was also practised). This quickly went out of fashion as the nests tended to collect moisture and damage the eggs.

Some collectors varnished their eggs, which has led me to more than one unfortunately yellowed example in the museum collection. Some examples, such as the great black cormorants below, even seem to have been polished, at least partially. Perhaps this was an attempt to mirror the polishing of seashells, or remove the "chalky" outer layer common to many species? I don't know.

The upper left example is in fact an early form of pokéball

 Since I wasn't planning to keep any of these eggs (the thought crossed my mind, but I don't really have anywhere to keep them), I had no plans to treat them for long term storage. But before I filled them with paint and went trolling for politicians, I wanted to inspect my efforts a bit more closely.

Good to know I'm not the only one cracking up

Well, it could be better. The hole is jagged and unsightly, and even though you can't see them, the cracks made by the skewer show up under the light.

I haven't inspected any of the museum's eggs like this, mostly because I have more pressing tasks but also because eggs are remarkably sensitive to light. According to some sources, all it takes is a few hours of bright sunlight for a delicate pattern to dull (some egg pigments are more volatile than others, however. Chicken eggs are very robust, but many other species do fade quickly in light. Some can even be rubbed off in one's fingers).

I decided to have one more try, if only to make a neater hole and have something to show off properly.

The neatest drilling mark yet!

All for naught

Sadly this was not to be, the third egg broke in much the same way as the first, only it was the skewer that betrayed me instead of the knife.

I learned a lot from this experiment, and my honest opinion is that blowing eggs really isn't as hard as I thought it would be. I know that in parts of the world it's still practiced today, especially for Easter decoration (we always just boiled them), and I wonder what kind of equipment people use. Are there still old egg drills and blowing tubes around, are they sold in shops? In hindsight I should really have looked that up for my report. Ah well. Certainly I think that better equipment would have made the task much easier.

Finally, you might be asking, what did I do with the contents of the eggs? Those who know me know that this is a very silly question.

Natural history is delicious

Anyway, I have much more to talk about and a lot to catch up on, so hopefully you'll be hearing from me again soon.

The information on ostrich eggs came from the University of Cambridge and I thoroughly recommend watching the video on their research here. It's absolutely fascinating.

A short book review

I did a lot of reading for this project, and some of it was remarkably interesting for reasons quite other than expected. One in particular which was recommended to me is Egg-shells by one Michael Prynne. The book is ostensibly on the repair of eggs, but contains a great deal of the author's other thoughts on maintaining bird populations, when collecting eggs is and is not permissible (something of a moot point as he was writing in 1963, just under a decade since collection became illegal in the UK), the methods by which eggs may be collected and the reasons for same, plus plentiful anecdotes describing his experiences as an active collector. With the recommendation came the caveat that towards the end of the book the author airs some decidedly unpalatable views on eugenics, and indeed this is the case. For a time I referred to the book rather flippantly for that reason, but in taking the time to read through it properly, I was pleasantly reminded that history is populated by characters, not caricatures.

Prynne was a more interesting and nuanced person than I expected. Many of his opinions range from questionable to objectionable (he is as sexist as one might expect) to downright shocking (he is a proponent of human sterilisation), but at the same time he is generally careful to provide counterpoints to most of the arguments he makes. His presentation is often entertaining, though mostly when talking about eggs, and rarely does he stray into dogmatism.

I haven't done any further research on Prynne, but by his own account he was a pilot in WWI and an officer for most of his working life. He gives an account of some time after the war, when he was placed in charge of a group of African soldiers. One might expect, knowing what we do of him, that he might make an unkind judge of his charges, but, to my unpracticed eye at least, his recounting of the occasion is surprisingly low in bigotry. In fact he appears ashamed of his initial prejudice and being unable to tell the soldiers apart, and frankly admits to his ignorance in the matter, going on to describe how in the following months he learned otherwise. The whole story was intended to illustrate an advisement on eggs, but that's beside the point.

The point is not to judge Prynne or his opinions, that's far beyond the scope of this blog. The point is that he was possessed of more than two dimensions, and makes a fine illustration of one of the reasons I enjoy studying history. Prynne is very much a product of his time, everything from his phrasing ("great socking beam") to his opinions to his recounted actions, and as a case study he's fascinating, perhaps especially when one disagrees with him. He has some charming anecdotes about water voles and nightingales. He gets angry when recounting an occasion when an eagle was shot and tempers his tirade against housecats by admitting that they provide valuable companionship for their owners. While obviously chafing at the new laws he even admits that his hobby needs "reasonable control." In fact it's a repeated mantra throughout the book that egg collectors themselves, while a maligned and much-underappreciated group in his view, are themselves partly responsible for the straits they found themselves in. Or at least, the more unscrupulous ones are. He was firmly of the belief that well-regulated egg collecting would be substantially less harmful to birds than modern farming or housecats, in which I have to admit he probably had a point, though it's worth pointing out that 1. housecats rarely snack on falcon eggs and 2. the pesticides Prynne condemned were arsenic compounds and killed everything. We've come a long way since then.
I enjoy the study of history (especially through museums) because it enables me to get closer to people, animals, cultures and modes of thought vastly removed from what I am familiar with. I suspect that if I were ever to have met him, I would probably not have liked Michael Prynne very much. But that just made him more interesting.

Some background

Today's topic of enquiry is: why are these eggs being curated now?

After all, collecting eggs was outlawed in the UK in 1954 and possessing any eggs collected after that date has been illegal since 1981, so you'd think that the collections would have had plenty of time to shuffle into a comfortable niche by now. My theory is that it is the very illegality of the eggs which saw them slip down the pecking order.



If you know what I mean

There are a number of reasons that a museum would choose not to display eggs today. They are physically and chemically fragile, vulnerable to mechanical and light damage. They remain objects of desire for illegal collectors, not only increasing the risk of crime directed at the museum but also potentially serving as inspiration to potential nest-robbers in the wild. Finally, to many people, eggs are just not that interesting. They might carry interesting stories (and to many collectors they certainly did), or serve as objects to illustrate a particular species of bird, but in my limited observation they do not appear to excite interest in themselves.



Which is why we do things like this

I speculate that a large part of this disinterest is simply because most people do not have regular contact with eggs outside the context of sausages, bacon and toast. Whereas at least one of the collectors I researched started out with eggs given to him by his mother, these days nests are a hazard to be avoided. How many of us have heard “don't touch it, because if you do then the mother won't take it back” from a well-intentioned yet factually misinformed authority figure? The illegality of collecting, or even temporarily possessing, wild eggs has likely furthered this thematic isolation, and actual isolation seems to have been the consequence of disappearing hedgerows and wooded areas. In short, how are people supposed to be interested in items that they are largely unfamiliar with?

Arcane talismans from the netherworld

Public interest in eggs is a subject I hope to return to later, but others have argued that this disconnect is not so much due to eggs being uninteresting as people lacking the opportunity to discover an interest in them.

But I disgress. I should be clear that the eggs I am working with haven't languished, completely forgotten. Some effort was made in the 1970's to put them in a semblance of order (more on that later), several have been reboxed at least once. But given that they were always extremely unlikely to make it into the public eye, save the occasional item in the bird displays, there was no convincing reason to prioritise time and resources for them when there were always more immediate and demanding projects at hand.

Alright, so now I've covered why the egg collections haven't been worked on until now, so what changed? The answer is three words: Kelvin Hall Project.

Kelvin Hall has been a constant refrain throughout the last year of my classes. It's BIG NEWS for the Glasgow museum/culture scene. The current building was built in 1927 almost opposite the Kelvingrove Museum, a red stone twin. It's quite fetching on the outside, and huge on the inside. It's been host to concerts, circuses, sporting events and for 23 years, Glasgow's Museum of Transport. It's now become the focus of a joint effort between The Hunterian, Glasgow Museums, and the National Library of Scotland. Since the Transport Museum upped sticks to reimagine itself as the Riverside Museum in 2011, Kelvin Hall has been largely empty. In (I think) 2014 funding was secured to begin work to turn it into a facility for all of the above organisations. According to the plan, it's going to be a workspace with offices, a leisure centre, a state-of-the-art storage facility for the museums, and shelter for baby unicorns.

And to think you bought the narwhal story

Ok, I might be overstating it a tad, but the way people talk about it, Kelvin Hall will solve problems that we've not even thought of yet. And who's to say they're wrong? Both The Hunterian and Glasgow Museums have serious storage issues at the moment, they are bursting at the seams. I was going to put a picture of the more dire examples here, but they're so ramshackle that it would probably be a security risk.

All that storage (and it is a LOT) is only part of the story. There's going to be research and teaching labs, talks and tours around the stores (in much the same way as the GMRC), meeting/conference spaces and what I think will be the largest gym in the city.

Sounds great, doesn't it? All of this embedded right in the middle of the west end of Glasgow, within easy walking distance of the university and surrounded by other cultural institutions. It goes without saying that my own course in Museum Studies is going to be massively overhauled to take advantage of all this. If only I'd waited a few years, right?



Doesn't it look clean? Industrial Glasgow was, of course, spotless

The project was in planning for a very long time, but work started as soon as money became available. This very sudden onset has had two effects pertinent to my own work: it has made unpacking attic collections necessary as part of a larger decant project, and it has thus provided an opportunity to do some work on them while we're at it. Curating the Zoology Museum's eggs was a long-held wish of curator Maggie Reilly, but for reasons already outlined, scrabbling through the attic for eggs was never going to be top priority. Kelvin Hall is uprooting all that anyway, it's the perfect opportunity to perform some long-delayed research.

It also has one other major advantage. Having the eggs properly curated and organised not only brings them an atom's-width closer to becoming a display collection, but it makes them far more accessible for their primary purpose as a research collection. Despite their unfashionable status in the public eye, the scientific community remains very interested in eggs. Everyone knows about the Ratcliffe paper of 1970, in which historical egg shells were used to implicate DDT in the degradation of shell thickness, but this kind of research isn't a closed book. As a resource to study the effects of climate change, pollution and other environmental concerns, they're actually very valuable.

No reason for this picture, I just think it's pretty

So, given how long they've been sitting around, why is it only now that the eggs are seeing curatorial efforts again? Because they're in the middle of a decant into a shiny new storage facility, and we carpe'd that diem.

...Update on business!

The gecko favoured me with eye contact!

I have no idea what this is supposed to say or mean!

Both of the snakes shed recently!

That's all folks, see you next time!

"So what are you actually DOING?"

Today's entry is going to be about the actual, physical work of the egg project (as opposed to the report writing, because we all know that the thesis is a cakewalk). To start with, the eggs have to be taken to the lab from the space they've been occupying in the attic, arriving in whatever container they've been sitting in for the last thirty to a hundred and thirty years.

The attic: a fortune if you find the right tooth fairy

Presentation is everything

Note: I call it a lab but that's mostly force of habit.
The next step is photography. Depending on the kind of box, I'm sometimes able to take pictures of the eggs in situ. The wooden ones are great for this, the cardboard not so much. I have to make sure that all parts of the object/labels are included, and if there are any special marks or writing then I need to take a picture of that too. I generally clean the labels and if I can I sometimes make an attempt to clean the eggs. Many of them sat through a chunk of the Glaswegian industrial revolution, and as a result are absolutely filthy. It's generally far too time-consuming to be worthwhile though, and the result always leaves something to be desired. I think perhaps the eggs which were varnished have just turned a weird yellow drippy colour and there's nothing to be done about that.
Nothing within the scope of this project, anyway.

Tools of a very particular trade

Above: the equipment I use for arranging the eggs and labels when I can't take a picture in the box. The black marking is from cleaning off the labels, the pins are to hold curled paper in place without taping or perforating it. The slide helps to hold down labels that are already torn and the scissors are just needlessly huge for the task of cutting tiny paper labels.
The paintbrush is particularly important: before I got my hand in I was very worried about breaking any of the tiny eggs. Even now that I can handle them with some confidence, eggs that already cracked are immeasurably more fragile than their mostly-whole kin, and sometimes I just need a gentler touch to nudge one into position. That said, the only time I've damaged an egg is when even that featherlight touch was too strong for the fractured shell and it buckled under the pressure (worth noting: I'd already picked it up in my fingers without ill effect).

The third language is Sinhalese, I'm still looking into translation

Those eggs that came in nice wooden boxes can just be pictured in them. The aim is to record what the specimens look like and document them with their number.

Lets go fly a kite

Photography comes first because each entry in the database has one or more pictures associated with it, so it makes sense to get all the pictures done first. The database itself takes up the bulk of my time, though as I become more proficient in its use I've been able to find a few shortcuts here and there.

The Hunterian Museum uses KE EMu to manage its collections. It's a very detailed piece of software, though for this task I'm only entering a few pieces of information. Each egg or group of eggs is given a new number by yours truly, which in this case has taken the format of 158***. Almost all of them have an older number from previous cataloguing, mostly on paper, which are the ones starting with ZE. I also record which collection the egg/s originally came from (of the five I mentioned previously), the donor (Biles, for example), the location the egg was collected from and of course the species.

This last one has been particularly problematic for the Sri Lankan eggs. Unlike the European species, which comparatively speaking haven't shifted about too much in the last hundred years, the Biles collection is filled with species in which neither the common nor taxonomic name is accurate. Much of the time there's not even a connecting thread by which to link the old and modern names. This is a topic on which I hope to write more in another blog post, but for now I'll return to the European eggs.

The European eggs have mostly been straightforward to place taxonomically (with the notable exception of the REED BUNTING), and KE EMu has a handy function by which if it recognises the Genus you type in it will fill in the Family, Order etc. It's a bit buggy at times, but it's saved me having to type out Muscicapidae enough times that I'm happy.
I check every name to make sure it's up to date, and most of the time (I'm looking at you, REED BUNTING) the most up to date name is easily available online. On the not-infrequent occasions of a discrepancy I consult our double tome, Howard and Moore.

My view ~60% of the time

It's important to have a final reference. Even if a detail turns out to be incorrect, anyone following my work later will be able to check the books to see what I was following and why.
For referencing the eggs there's a second book...

Aww, innit cute?

This is the book I consult if I want to see if an egg has maybe rolled into the wrong compartment (has happened at least once) or been misidentified in the past.

Together those two books and Google The All-Knowing keep me informed, at least of European species. The Sri Lankan ones are of course mentioned in Howard and Moore, but much of the time I don't even know what name to look up.

The eventual aim of the project is to have the eggs relabelled and reboxed. We haven't reached that stage yet, mainly due to a few unexpected hurdles in getting the labels ready. We have some really nice boxes though, and some nice clean padding.

My test-of-concept box. Yes I was still practicing with song lyrics

I'm hoping that soon I'll be able to start moving the eggs already in the database into their new homes, which will mix the collections (which is why it's so important to record those data) and organise them by taxonomy rather than donor, date or origin.

Ideally they will look something like this!

Except better!

And that's the physical, hands-on, non-research work. Which still involves some research. Can't escape it!


In other news, this is more of the museum's gecko than I'd ever seen until this point!

Talk to the tail

The little hermit might be warming up to me!

John Harvard Biles: engineer, professor, egg collector?

I'd like to kick things off with an example of the kind of work I'm doing. I mentioned before that the museum has five egg collections, these are all named after places or people associated with that particular collection. The Minard collection, for example, is associated with the Hamiltons of Minard. The exception to this rule is the collection in cabinet 18, comprising a series of unnervingly open glued-cardboard containers, clearly far younger than their contents, and an interesting selection of eggs and labels. These hadn't been closely examined for some decades, their provenance largely a mystery.



A box from Cabinet 18. Not pictured: my face when the glue started cracking

As part of the background to this project Maggie Reilly, my supervisor in the museum, trawled through various records and uncovered a card revealing that in 1908 the museum had received a collection of bird eggs from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as part of a donation from a Professor Biles. The donation also included animal skulls from Africa and an octopus from Japan. A quick search through the university records revealed only one candidate: Sir John Harvard Biles, John Elder Professor of Naval Engineering from 1891 to 1921.




John Harvard Biles from the National Portrait Gallery

Thankfully a Biles wasn't too difficult to find, we'd have been decidedly less successful I think if his name had been Smith. Sir John was apparently a man much in demand, sitting on various committees and acting as a consultant on ship construction when he wasn't designing them himself. In my brief examination of his writings, he seems to have been a strong critic of those who sought to compromise good engineering practice or safety in the name of convenience or luxury. He was one of the foremost engineering sources consulted by the British enquiry following the sinking of the Titanic and probably had a hand in deciding what recommendations to make (the near-ubiquitous passage in modern texts about how the disaster led to ships carrying more lifeboat space is likely due at least in part to Biles, who called for such less than a week after the sinking). He was aware, and despaired, of the very human behaviour of overlooking risks except in the aftermath of disaster, taking what I would call a very typical engineer's point of view that "acceptable risk" is a contradiction in terms.

But what has this to do with eggs?! Well there's the rub, so far I've found almost nothing to suggest that Biles was a naturalist or egg collector, every source emphasises his engineering credentials and mentions nothing about even being a keen ornithologist. He was fond of sailing though, and is known to have visited Africa, Japan and Sri Lanka (!) as part of his travels. His knighthood in 1922 was formally to invest him as a "Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire" for some form of services rendered to the India Office (I may correct this statement later as more information becomes available). While it's practically certain that the donor J.H. Biles mentioned in the museum records is John Harvard Biles of engineering fame, and he held his position at the university when the donation was made, how he came by the collection and why he donated it remain unknown.



Perhaps the prettiest collection of eggs so far found in the Biles collection

There is one other big question though, which is how do we know that the collection in cabinet 18 and the Biles donation are one and the same? The collection lacks any information besides the labels for the eggs themselves, an example of which is pictured above. The lowest label dates from the 1970's, the middle one is presumed to be contemporaneous with the eggs and the numerical one at the top is the new one I gave them.

There are several specimens in the collection from Sri Lanka (such as the "Ceylonese parakeet"), some of which from species endemic to the island. Additionally, the third language on the original labels, after English and Latin, appears to be Sinhalese. I'm still working on that as the names do not match up well, it's possible that they were poorly recorded at the time, or simply that the language has shifted in the last hundred years or so. Either way, what we now know is that the collection in cabinet 18 contains several species endemic to Sri Lanka and appears at time of writing to be labelled in one of the native languages of that country. The evidence is indirect, but it's enough that we've started referring to the collection in cabinet 18 as "the Biles collection."





I had to clean this one up a bit

There's still more work to be done, we still don't know whether Biles collected the eggs himself or simply bought them, nor do we know what his purpose in doing so was. There's also evidence that some of the eggs, specifically the ones from Europe, may have once belonged to a different collection, as their style of label is markedly different.



The label style suggests a display collection, perhaps?

I haven't yet finished going through this collection. Many of the Eastern species have been renamed several times, often since the last round of identification in the 70's, so ensuring that they are correctly named in the database is a time consuming process. There's also, I'm told, a good twelve metres (!!) of material in the university archives on J.H Biles, and while I'm sure most of that will be relating to his engineering work, I hope to find some material pointing to his hobbies or travels, something to flesh out the scant information on this collection.

That's all for now, hopefully I'll have more on Biles in the coming weeks, but for now I've got to move on.

N.B. Most of the information I obtained on Sir John Biles came from Grace's Guide.

Hello World

Let me begin by introducing myself, my name is Adam Hotson and at the time of writing I am in the closing months of my Master's degree in Museum Studies at the University of Glasgow. This blog is partly intended as a place for me to document the work I am doing as part of my final project, partly as a place for me to showcase some of the interesting, unusual or otherwise noteworthy things that come to light during the course of the work.



Your intrepid host

My project, in brief, is to enter the details of five distinct egg collections into a database, then rebox the eggs so that they are ready for moving to a new location next year. The latter part is important as many of the eggs are in less than ideal conditions, modern best practice having surpassed the standards of ~160 years ago. Additionally the collections are to be merged and ordered taxonomically, so it's important to record which of the original five collections an egg came from and, if not already known, identify it to at least family level. I haven't yet reached the reboxing stage, but I've had some practice handling and writing on the eggs, the latter being the museum's chosen method by which to maintain ID. Labels can get lost, after all, and one egg is much like another to non-experts.

 



I got bored of writing dates. Is this the first time Gilbert and Sullivan have been written on a goose egg? We may never know

 

I've never really kept a blog before, so this will be a learning experience and I hope to improve along the way. Finally, I also have a twitter account, @TheRargian, where I'll be posting extra thoughts and observations from The Hunterian's Zoology Museum. This blog is still a work in progress, but thanks for stopping by!