"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!