birding-aus

Egg Collectors?

To: Birding Aus <>
Subject: Egg Collectors?
From: Andrew Hobbs <>
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:46:21 +0900
Hi,

The demise of egg collecting does have its downside of course. This is what Michael Morcombe says in the Introduction to his Field Guide to Australian Birds (2004 edition). He is talking about the distribution maps found in his (and all Australian) field guides.

"The maps, while showing races and where best to find each species, do not include breeding range. Unlike Europe and North America, information for most Australian species is, as yet, far too sparse to allow accurate maps that show breeding range. Maps based on sparse data can be quite misleading.

"But nowadays few observers can find and identify nests, particularly those that are small and well hidden. The most skilled nest finders were egg collectors - and there are many fewer egg collectors today than in the past - and bird photographers. Until the relatively recent advent of powerful telephoto lenses, most birds were photographed at their nests and the photographers became skilled at finding carefully hidden nests of species such as the Rufous-crowned Emu-wren, and at spotting the beautifully camouflaged nests of birds such as the Sittella, the Lemon-bellied Flycathcher, the Southern Scrub-Robin and nightjars, to name but a few.

"The demise of the nineteenth century practive of egg collecting and the decline of bird-at-nest photography may have resulted in slightly less disturbance of birds at their nests. But this was never significant, except in the case of very rare species, compared with predation by cats, foxes, raptors and goannas, or the take-over of nest hollows by introduced birds and bees. Even one pair of Square-tailed Kite, a native species of raptor that preys on small birds' nestlings, would each year account for the loss of more birds than would the disturbance caused by all the egg collectors and photographers of yore.

"As a result of this gradual loss of observers skilled in finding nests, fewere nest sites and breeding ranges are recorded nowadays. Consequently, early nest records nad photographs that have acdded to the overall bank of bird knowledge, along with collections of birds skins in museums, are likely to increase in significance with time."

Cheers

Andrew



Tony Russell wrote:
Hm ! See what you mean Carl.

-----Original Message-----
From: Carl Clifford Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 1:36 PM
To: Tony Russell
Cc: 'Evan Beaver'; 'Birding-aus'
Subject: Re: [Birding-Aus] Egg Collectors?


Many, many (now sane) birders.... sane?...birders?....where?

Carl Clifford


On 30/10/2007, at 1:50 PM, Tony Russell wrote:

Evan, many many (now sane) birders started off in life as mad egg
collectors - I was one myself until aged about twelve. The trick was to
get the contents out without breaking the shell and then display them to
your friends - those with the best and biggest collections held the most
status.  Seems barbaric to me now but that's how it was before I took a
different approach to birds and conservation.  Maybe some people are
still back there in the dark ages and we need to guard against their
activities. No doubt there are still others out there prepared to run
the gauntlet of our laws, collecting eggs of desirable species for
commercial sale, and they need to be stopped too.  Others collect for
museums, but I won't go there.

Tony the ex Pom.

-----Original Message-----
From: 
 On Behalf Of Evan Beaver
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 11:19 AM
To: Birding-aus
Subject: [Birding-Aus] Egg Collectors?


Birders,

Now I'm treading carefully here, in an effort to better understand a
contraversial subject. Recently there was talk of a Painted HE nest and
the potential problems of disclosing this due to egg collectors. Now, my
question is this: What are egg collectors up to? Collecting for export
to hatch somewhere else? I would have thought this pretty unreliable,
keeping the egg alive. Do they actually collect the eggs and catalogue
them in some sort of collection? Either way it sounds very dodgy and not
at all to be encouraged. Unless of course they have a penchant for
Indian Mynah eggs.

EB

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