YOUNG BIRDS AND BIRDS' EGGS 



BY R. W. SHUFELDT 



(PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR) 



WHEN one comes to trace back the life histories of 

 our American naturalists to the days they made 

 their first juvenile collections, it will be discovered 

 that they were started with birds' eggs in a large percent- 

 age of cases. If they lived in the country, the eggs of 

 the wild birds of the locality were the first ones brought 

 together, and generally arrayed in a modest little cabinet, 

 all being duly labeled with their English names. As such 

 boys come to manhood ; pass through college, and enter 

 upon the active work of life, nineteen out of twenty of 

 them forget their little cabinet of eggs, and the nature- 

 taste gradually dies out. In one of the twenty, however, 

 the "bent" is too strong to be so lightly cast aside, and 



ample, a song sparrow's egg is a common egg, and speci- 

 mens of it can be purchased in the open market for a 

 few cents each. Upon the other hand, the egg of the 

 extinct Great Auk is a very rare egg, and a few years 

 ago one sold, at auction, in London, for one thousand 

 dollars. Between these two extremes, the eggs of wild 

 birds the world over fetch all sorts of prices. But to 

 return to our point the matter of percentages of owners 

 or keepers of large collections of eggs how few there 

 are that have given attention to all there is to be known 

 about such specimens ; and the same may be said of nest- 

 lings or young birds generally. It may be noted here, 

 however, that some, indeed many, of the problems of 



THREE BIRDLINGS, BUT NONE OF A KIND 



Figure I. As one would naturally expect, young birds of different species and groups vary greatly in appearance and form; this is well shown 

 here where there is to the left, a young red-eyed vireo, a sparrow-hawk in the center, and a fledgling wood thrush to the right. 



ornithology, or some other path in general biology, comes 

 to be the professional one followed throughout life. 

 Some go far afield from bird's eggs, and end in becoming 

 palaeontologists, or botanists, or in any other equally re- 

 mote department ; but they all look back with more or 

 less affection to their boyhood days spent in the woods 

 and fields, along streams and seashore, where they dis- 

 covered their first nests of bluejay, killdeer, and spotted 

 sandpiper. 



The writer has met and come to know well many pro- 

 fessional men who have made birds' eggs their life study, 

 and some of them have accumulated collections worth 

 all the way up to twenty thousand dollars or more yes, 

 twenty thousand dollars; for, as in the case of all such 

 material, birds' eggs, like everything else of the kind, 

 run common, not common, rare, and very rare. For ex- 



scientific nidology yet remain to be solved. How few 

 there are who can name all the parts of a fresh birds' 

 egg that is, an unincubated one; while there are few, 

 very few, among us that can, off-hand, carry an incubat- 

 ing bird's egg all the way up from the perfectly fresh 

 stage to hatched bird, naming all the parts as they 

 appear and develop the entire embryology, in fact, until 

 it terminates in the completed process of the living bird- 

 ling. From men to mice, each and all of the principal 

 stages of embryonic development prenatal stages are 

 exemplified and practically reproduced in the hatching of 

 a humming-bird's egg. But this is only a single chapter; 

 for there is the chemistry of the egg structure, and the 

 questions of teratology or double and united chicks in 

 the same egg, of which there is an endless series, all the 

 way from a bird with three legs to an avian Siamese pro- 



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