INTRODUCTION. XLI 
Regarding the so-called egg collectors, I find the following passage in Mr. John 
Burroughs’ little volume, ‘Signs and Seasons’’: 
“Among the worst enemies of our birds are the so-called ‘collectors,’ men who 
plunder nests and murder their owners in the name of science. Not the genuine orni- 
thologist, for no one is more careful of squandering bird life than he; but the sham 
ornithologist, the man whose vanity or affectation happens to take an ornithological 
turn. He is seized with an itching for a collection of eggs and birds because it happens 
to be the fashion, or because it gives him the air of a man of science. But in the 
majority of cases the motive is a mercenary one; the collector expects to sell these 
spoils of the groves and orchards. Robbing nests and killing birds becomes a business 
with him. He goes about it systematically, and becomes an expert in circumventing 
and slaying our songsters. Every town of any considerable size is infested with one or 
more of these bird highwaymen, and every nest in the country round about that the 
wretches can lay hands on is harried. Their professional term for a nest of eggs is 
‘a clutch,’ a word that well expresses the work of their grasping, murderous fingers. 
They clutch and destroy in the germ the life and music of the woodlands. Certain of 
our natural history journals are mainly organs of communication between these human 
weasels, They record their ex-exploits at nest-robbing and bird-slaying in their columns. 
One collector tells with gusto how he ‘worked his way’ through an orchard, ransacking 
every tree and leaving, as he believed, not one nest behind him. He had better not be 
caught working his way through my orchard. Another gloats over the number of 
Connecticut Warblers—a rare bird—he killed in one season in Massachusetts. Another 
tells how a Mockingbird appeared in southern New England and was hunted down by 
himself and friend, its eggs ‘clutched,’ and the bird killed. Who knows how much the 
bird lovers of New England lost by that foul deed? The progeny of the birds would 
probably have returned to Connecticut to breed, and their progeny, or a part of them, 
the same, till in time the famous southern songster would have become a regular 
visitant to New England. In the same journal still another collector describes minutely 
how he outwitted three Hummingbirds and captured their nests and eggs,—a clutch he 
was very proud of. A Massachusetts bird harrier boasts of his clutch of the eggs of 
that dainty little Warbler, the Blue Yellow-back. One season he took two sets, the 
next five sets, the next four sets, beside some single eggs, and the next season four sets, 
and says he might have found more had he had more time. One season he took, in 
about twenty days, three sets from one tree. I have heard of a collector who boasted 
of having taken one hundred sets of the eggs of the Marsh Wren in a single day; of 
another, who took, in the same time, thirty nests of the Yellow-breasted Chat; and of 
still another, who claimed to have taken one thousand sets of eggs of different birds in 
one season. A large business has grown up under the influence of this collecting craze. 
One dealer in eggs has those of over five hundred species. He says that his business 
in 1883 was twice that of 1882; in 1884 it was twice that of 1883, and so on. Col- 
lectors vie with each other in the extent and variety of their cabinets. They not only 
obtain eggs in sets, but aim to have a number of sets of the same bird so as to show 
all possible variations. I hear of a private collection that contains twelve sets of King- 
birds’ eggs, eight sets of House Wrens’ eggs, four sets of Mockingbirds’ eggs, etc.; sets 
