17 APRIL 1897, Page 13

EDIBLE BIRDS' EGGS.

AMONG the presents sent to Prince Bismarck on his eighty-third birthday were a hundred crows' eggs, "a luxury difficult to procure so early in the season." The eggs were probably rooks' eggs, not crows'; but the fact remains that eggs here only eaten by ploughboys are in Germany appreciated by Princes. Custom, which rules in matters of eating more than in any other department of life, has set very narrow limits to the English idea of what are, and what are not, edible eggs. This must be mainly due to fancy, for the taste of the eggs of most birds is almost the same, though that of a very few, such as the plover and the guinea-fowl, is distinctly superior. Much has been written as to the sale of other birds' eggs, gulls', guillemots', and redshanks', for plovers' eggs. They are good enough of their kind, but the difference can be recognised when the shell is stripped off. Not even those of the redshank approach the plover's in flavour. The gull's eggs are so unlike those of the peewit, that the per- sistence of the tradition that duly are sold as plovers' eggs

is puzzling. The explanation is somewhat curious. The belief had its origin in a confusion of names, which is illus- trated by a note of Sir Thomas Browne. The old Norfolk name for the black-headed gull was " poet," and these poets' eggs were formerly much more commonly used for food than peewits' eggs. Sir Thomas speaks of the " puets, in such plentie about Horsey, that they sometimes bring them in carts to Norwich, and sell them at small rates, and the country people make use of their eggs in puddings and otherwise." The black-headed gull was, and to some extent is still, the principal wild contributor to our egg supply, except the rock-fowl of the coast. At the celebrated gullery in Scoulton Mere, in Norfolk, the first eggs are generally laid in the middle of March, and none are taken after a certain time, fixed yearly, according as the season is early or late. As late as 1800, according to Mr. Thomas Southwell, from eight thousand to nine thousand eggs were taken annually from this one colony. Several of the ancient galleries of Norfolk are now extinct. That near Wangford was destroyed, according to the evidence of a warrener who remembered the "toddy moddies." as he called them, "by taking their eggs too close." On the other hand, fresh colonies have been established elsewhere. Mr. Sonthwell gives an interesting account of their welcome at Hoveton, whither they migrated from Rollesby. They came late in the season of 1854, having been disturbed in their former breeding- place. By the spring of 1858 it was possible to gather their eggs, and seven hundred were taken. In 1864 and afterwards two thousand eggs per annum were supplied by the poet gulli. Rats were their chief enemies. According to Mr. Walter Rye the weasel was described by a Norfolk keeper as the " egg-suckyest varmin " he knew. But a gallery rat is as bad. At Stanford, in 1834, the eggs were gathered and sold for threepence a dozen, and a tumbrel-load might have been taken in a day. The birds were robbed from March till June, and so at last driven away. A few returned, and bred for three years, but were harried out of the place, as Lord Walsingham believed, by otters. In the markets in Holland all kinds of large birds' eggs appear for sale, and are pre- sumably intended to be eaten. Redshankie, greenshanks', and godwits' are the commonest in the market-stalls of South Holland, but one sees also the bright-blue eggs of the heron and those of wild ducks. Formerly a very large trade was done in wild-fowl eggs with the shepherds of the Isle of Texel. The north part of the " Taxel " (as it is pronounced by the Dutch) is still called " eyer-land "—" egg-land "—and it was from this district that the supply was mainly drawn. In Friesland, the Dutch Norfolk, where meres, broads, heaths, and wild fowl abound, the sheldrakes' eggs are one of the minor sources of pocket-money to the villagers. Sheldrakes like to nest in a burrow, in which they would normally lay one setting of eggs and then hatch them off. The Frieslanders provide ready-made burrows, from which a dozen nesting chambers radiate. These artificial nests are made in a grass- covered sand-hill, a loose turf being laid over each nesting chamber, which is removed when the egg is taken, and then replaced. The strangest part of this arrangement is the tameness of the birds. Several females use the same entrance, and will allow themselves to be handled. They go on laying, regularly like hens, until the middle of June, when they are allowed to sit. The late Mr. H. Durnford, the first English naturalist who described the wild life of the Frisian Islands, noted that each villager generally owned one of these shel- drake lodging-houses, and that they were scrupulously honest in not taking each other's eggs.

This is greatly to the credit of the Frisians, because egg- stealing is not only an almost universal frailty among rustics, of whatever nation, but is the only form of crime which is generally recognised and labelled as larceny in the animal community. Every bird knows that the other bird's eggs are that bird's property. It is not like a young one, but a chattel ; and there is a distinct criminal class among birds which knowingly steal eggs, just as there is a respectable class, the great majority, who know that they have to guard against this. Betwixt and between there is a doubtful stratum, re- presented in this country by rooks, starlings (which take larks' eggs), and gulls, who are not habitual criminals, but are liable to stray when temptation comes. The professional egg-stealers among our birds are the carrion-crow, the magpie, the jay, and the jackdaw. They have no misgivings whatever

as to the edible properties of all eggs, though we never knew an instance of the stealing from each other. They are per- fectly aware that they are stealing, and their whole air and demeanour when so employed is different to that which they wear when hunting for legitimate food. The following cases may be cited. In April, 1896, a wild duck was dis- turbed from her nest in a copse in the Isle of Wight. An hour later a pair of crows found the nest; it held eleven eggs, rather too many for two crows' breakfasts. They invited a few friends, ate all the eggs, and then began such a chorus of croaks and shouts that the crime was suspected. Every egg was gone before a single crow uttered a sound. In Holland two magpies found a pheasant sitting. They waited till early next morning, and then set to work at day- break, when their proceedings were watched. One went behind the pheasant and pecked its tail till the bird turned round and rushed at the magpie. The other magpie at once spiked an egg and flew off. Two jackdaws which had a nest in a hollow tree near a house in Suffolk showed a touching affection for a bantam hen. They hopped about the yard in her company, ate out of the plate of food set down for the bantams, and were much commended. The bantam had a nest in the garden known to the household. As no eggs were visible for some days a watch was kept. The two jackdaws were seen sitting by their friend, who was on the nest. When the egg was laid the bantam flew of clucking, and as soon as she was gone one of the daws flew off with the egg.

The permanently hungry, savage, or uncomfortable human species are all inveterate egg-eaters and egg-robbers. People who have scarcely any food except salted sea-fowl naturally look on their well-flavoured eggs as a luxury. Civilised man, who does not live on boiled guillemot, which would make him sick, can eat a boiled guillemot's egg with relish. So in Labrador, and the Orkneys, and the Faroe Islands, and other places which Nature intended to be dwelt in by sea- birds, and not by men, razorbills' eggs, guillemots' eggs, and those of other rock-fowl are a very important item in the sub-Arctic food-supply. The same eggs gathered by our coast cliff-climbers, if sold for food, and not to those who buy them to put in egg-collections, or as ornaments for cabinets and mantelpieces, are mainly used in cooking,—not boiled and served au naturel. In the brush- turkey of New South Wales the natives had a bird which was- as useful to them as the sheldrakes to the Frisians, without giving them the trouble of making a nesting-place which the birds could use in common, and so save them the trouble of finding each separate clutch. Many pairs united to form a mound, and this served them year after year. The eggs are laid in the decaying leaves, and hatched by the heat en- gendered, but before this takes place the natives rob the nest. A bushel of eggs as large as a turkey's were often taken in the early days of the colony from a single mound. The ocellated leipoa, or native pheasant, has the same habits, and the communal nests were robbed twice or thrice in the season, the natives judging of the number of eggs laid in the hillock by the quantity of feathers lying about. It would be in- teresting to learn what proportion of the twenty-two million eggs imported into this country are ducks' eggs. They may be seen in numbers amongst those sold for cooking purposes. But scarcely any one eats them "fresh," boiled in their shells, for breakfast, though connoisseurs in the flavour of eggs pro- nounce them better than those of hens.