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!