This is a book full of unusual photos. They are all of bird nests and bird eggs, but there is not a bird to be seen. It is not an ecological study, but it has ecological insights. It is not a history of egg collecting but there is fascinating history within it. The variety of nests illustrates the extraordinary variety of life: different shapes and a wide range of materials, displaying the skills of their nest-builders.
The book is almost square. Each double-page is about the nest and eggs of one bird species. Each spread has one large photo with text alongside it providing the common name, scientific name, followed by a caption to photo & text, with the main text above. Each page spread tells us: the size of the nest, the species’ egg clutch size, when, where and by whom the nest and egg/s were collected, the conservation status of the species, and more. There are over a hundred pairs of pages, each for one species. The sequence is taxonomic, starting with Syrian Ostrich and ending with White’s Thrush, followed by a Taxonomy list of orders and families which mentions the common and scientific name of each species found in the book. Jonathan Jackson’s photos on every page are sharp and beautifully presented.
All these nests and eggs are held by the Natural History Museum. If you have walked its galleries in London, you will not have seen this collection because the bird, nest and egg collections are held at the Natural History Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire. Some of the bird nests and eggs in the book belong to extinct species, and you will find out why. Others are of ‘Conservation Concern’ and some explanation is given. There are species commonly found in the UK such as Blackcap, Dunnock or House Sparrow, but most are not British species: some are very uncommon, others are extinct.
Many nests & eggs were collected in the age of worldwide exploration, when unknown plants, animals, birds and their nests and eggs, were brought back to Britain by collectors. Some of these have significant historical connections. There is an egg of the Emperor Penguin that was collected by members of the 1910 British Antarctic Expedition led by Captain Scott. The Brown Noddy is represented by nest & egg collected on Ernest Shackleton’s final expedition. The ‘bag’ nest of an African Broadbill was collected by Sheffield Airey Neave, whose son Airey Middleton Neave was an MP, killed by a bomb in his car at the House of Commons during Margaret Thatcher’s time as PM. I was curious about another collector, who brought back nest & egg of a Red-faced Mousebird. He was William John Ansorge. His name is unusual, so I was not surprised to find that it was his son who was the renowned Buckinghamshire amateur entomologist, Sir Eric Cecil Ansorge, whose macro-moth Ansorge Collection is held by Buckinghamshire Museum. This information is from captions and text in this worldwide-ranging book.
This is a book you can dip into or deep dive into. It is not necessary to read it from end to end like a book of chapters, though you may find yourself working your way right through the book when you discover the fascination of the information it presents. I would have liked an index by common names, so I could re-find The Brown Noddy without having to remember its scientific name, Anous stolidus stolidus, essential as that is for sharing information internationally and for biodiversity records.
It is worth reminding ourselves of the good and bad aspects of egg-collecting. Until the UK’s 1954 Protection of Birds Act some bird watchers still collected bird eggs to ‘blow’ them empty, so they could display these in an egg collection. Since Oology became illegal, a few persistent egg-collectors have been caught, tried and subject to substantial fines. But the study of eggs collected before 1954 have enabled important scientific breakthroughs. The conservation value of being able to study eggs was shown when Derek Ratcliffe found a connection between use of pesticides such as DDT and Dieldrin and the thinness of egg-shells of Peregrines and other birds of prey, contributing towards their rapid decline. This, alongside Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring informed the growing resistance to the widespread use of damaging pesticides. Perhaps a future edition of Douglas Russell’s book could set the value of historic egg collections in this context.
What this book does is open a window on the era of scientific collection, in which Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and many lesser-known scientific explorers played significant parts. It is a treasure trove of moments in the lives of pioneering naturalists and the growing body of natural history knowledge and wonders. They were part of the centuries of rapid increase in scientific knowledge of nature and wildlife. But the accounts in this book make clear how many species have gone extinct and how many others are declining. The extraordinary number of ways in which birds made their nests is shown by this book, as is the large variety of their eggs.
Interesting Bird Nests & Eggs – Douglas G D Russell
The Natural History Museum, London: 2024
ISBN: 9780565095529
Hardback only £12.99
Available now from The Natural History Museum https://www.nhmshop.co.uk/interesting-bird-nests-eggs.html
Available through other retailers from 26 September 2024