It's the time of year when, walking along a hedgerow, or indeed anywhere in your own garden, you may come across a jewel in the grass - a fragment of a wild bird's egg. Bird-nesting has long been declared illegal and socially unacceptable and that fine essayist Robert Lynd gives over two of his meditations to this: "The Morals of Bird's Nesting" and then "The Morals of Bird's Nesting: Second Version." In the first, he tells us how he nearly took up that nefarious hobby. He found a hedge-sparrow's nest and "borrowed" one to give as a present to a lady who was ill. He pricked it at each end, blew out the contents in proper fashion, and laid it on the table beside her bed. "It looked prettier than any diamond that was ever stolen from an Indian temple. It was much admired."
Next day he set out - in a heat wave - on further exploration. He found a robin's nest and took one of the four eggs. He did not blow it. A good thing. For on this occasion, the hospital nurse, the children's nurse, the housemaid and the cook and even the patient set up a hue and cry: "He's robbed a robin's nest." He swore he would return the egg safely and as it had been in his hand all the time, was certain that the "poor little robin inside" would survive. So off again in the heat wave, up a hill to the nest and he delivers it safely. Five days later, or so, he visits the nest to find the full complement of four young robins alive and hungry. He had felt, he said, under the strictures of the nurse, the housemaid etc as if he were the man who shot the albatross.
In retailing all this he got deflected from his subject - the morality of it all. And he puts it straight: "I may say at once that I am a sworn enemy of bird's nesting." And "I doubt if the possession of the loveliest egg in the world is worth the song of a single hedge-sparrow." And he acknowledges that some of the finest of the "old-fashioned" naturalists such as Richard Jefferies shot kingfishers "and as good men as he have robbed birds' nests." But if you must collect, he advises, why not follow the example of a child he knows who collects the broken shells that fall out of the nests when the young are hatched?
He had seen this collection, laid in cotton wool "and I assure you it was one of the most attractive collections I have ever set eyes on." That's Robert Lynd. But without some egg collection where would the world's natural history museums be? TV is fine, but .. . Anyway that is all gone and the egg-stealer is an outlaw. Rightly so. Y