Country life Nest eggs Peter Quince
Bird's-nesting is not as popular with country boys as it used to be, which is certainly a very good thing. There are more than enough threats to the common and the uncommon birds alike without young roughnecks coming along to grab their eggs from the nest. I remember the
patiently-acquired collections which were objects of pride in my schooldays, containing the eggs of dozens of different species, all laid out in cases lined with cotton wool. It was a deplorable hobby, without a doubt, and many of us thought so at the time; nevertheless, it did depend upon a kind of easy familiarity with wild life which is rare nowadays. Any boy could put together an egg collection if he were so minded. The young today seem either to be serious ornithologists in the making (very impressive some of them are, too) or else they belong to the majority who never give the matter a single thought, and could probably not tell you the difference between a song-thrush and a blackbird, let alone distinguish between their eggs.
I never went in for egg-collecting but I liked to find nests, and I still do. It would be a reproach to a misspent life, I dare say, to compute how many hours I have idled away prowling along hedges or wandering over open ground, eyes down, in the half-serious hope of finding something interesting. The first nest of the year is always a cheerful point in the calendar. This year it was that of a robin, a finely-woven little lair insinuated into a crevice in an elm-tree bole, and from a cautious distance I have watched the reddish-brown eggs hatched into a brood of fledglings.
Robins are entertaining birds to observe at nesting-time because of their catholic taste in nesting sites. Most birds tend to stick pretty closely to the same sort of place. Robins have no such inhibitions, apparently demanding only that there should be ehole or cavity of some sort in which they can build. A friend of mine had a pair of robins nesting in his watering-can one year, he having inadvertently left the can out in the garden for a time. Flower-pots are also some
times used. But stranger places than this have been reported — in the pulpit of a church, for example, in the boot of a car standing in a garden, in a railway waggon, even on the handlebars of a bicycle left leaning against a wall. In nesting, as in some other respects, notably their lack of fear of man, robins are a law unto themselves.
Generally speaking birds are traditionalist about nesting sites. They are directed by their species' requirements. In the same way the style of egg and the degree of development of the young when hatched are set to a steady pattern. Birds who nest on the ground — the lapwing, to take a common example — hatch out young which are much more advanced than those hatched by birds nesting more securely up in trees. Ground-nesting birds also tend to produce eggs of a conical shape — again, this applies to the lapwing —so that they can be placed in the nest with their " points " inwards, an arrangement which uses the space economically and holds them in position. Birds which nest in deep recesses usually lay eggs more nearly spherical, since there is no risk of their rolling about.
The question which most intelligent children ask about birds' eggs is: Why are so many of them so brightly coloured? So far as I know, there is no completely satisfactory answer available. In some cases the markings on an egg represent an obvious (and extremely successful) use of camouflage techniques. But in many others there seems little practical point, and even some possible hazard, in the beautiful colours. There is still something mysterious about the subject. I shall not mind if it stays like that.
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