Egg Snatcher

You probably don’t think much about eggs, except for that point last year when they cost five dollars a piece. Brown or white, organic or the cheapest possible, extra-large or medium. Sunny-side up, scrambled. These are our choices.

Not so for oologists.

I recently finished The Falcon Thief, by Joshua Hammer, an account of egg snatching and the exploits of Jeffrey Lendrum, who at times dangled from helicopters to pick raptor eggs from nests atop high mountain peaks. I don’t think he ate the eggs, since he was selling them, but with so much potential food rolling around, I wouldn’t rule it out.

Lendrum claimed to be a bird lover. He even claimed to be doing the birds a favor, by saving them from predators, disaster, or disease. I like birds, too, but I don’t want to steal their eggs or even keep one as a pet. I like them flying around, perching on power lines, swooping for the mice and the bugs. I’m not even enthusiastic enough to go bird watching, much less egg stealing.

But I have a friend who uses her weekends and vacations to stalk birds and photograph them, creeping through dense brush for a sight of that one elusive species (it’s you, Laura Jolley). Laura posts pictures of birds on her social media almost daily. I love those pictures. They look like she was two inches from the bird, though I’m sure she was a polite distance, hunkered in some bush, swatting mosquitoes to get the perfect shot.

I mean, she gets really great bird pictures. I don’t see how there isn’t a major publisher beating down her door to print them in a coffee table book. It can only mean one thing: she’s not the only one with portfolios of perfect bird photos. There must be thousands of bird watchers out there, peering into their cameras, taking excellent photos simply for the fun of it.

I’ve not heard of anyone so obsessed with, let’s say frogs, or mice, or bugs. No one goes on vacation to photograph mice. I do know of one snake-stalker, who shares his footage at “Cottonmouth Acres,” which is as close to a nest of venomous snakes as I want to be.

But still, no one’s out there getting selfies with bugs and worms. In fact, I don’t know that there are any worm-watchers at all.

Of the small animals, it’s just birds that hold our fascination. Still, Fred and Laura aren’t rappelling down mountainsides to finger-fumble eagle and rattlesnake eggs into fanny packs, strapping them to their stomachs and sneaking through airport security. Their love is caring, not covetous.

Jeffrey Lendrum took the eggs of every endangered bird species he could find. Sometimes, he was getting paid by raptor-racers, but it was an obsession. He just couldn’t stop. He loved egg collecting.

Back a long time ago, that wouldn’t have been a problem. In the Victorian era, egg collecting (oology) was a respectable hobby, like stealing other cultures’ artifacts or inflecting European culture on the entire southern hemisphere. Men (it’s hard to collect eggs in corsets) amassed as many empty eggs as they could in their personal home displays – he with the most eggs wins. Collections numbered in the hundreds, the thousands.

As I was reading The Falcon Thief, I happened to come across Dr. Seuss’ Scrambled Eggs Super, which has been taken out of print due to poor depictions of other cultures. It’s the story of a boy who scours the world-over to steal an egg from every rare, endangered, or outrageous bird, in order to scramble them up and impress his lady friend.

Lendrum was born in the 1950s; I wonder if he read Scrambled Eggs Super. Instead, I’d like to recommend Egg: Nature’s Perfect Package or Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones.

Or Green Eggs and Ham, which has all the egg variety you’ll ever need.

by Jessi Waugh