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!