I remember finding the blue fragments of a robin’s egg when I was about 10. The delicate shards lay scattered on the ground beneath a tree. I squinted up at a small, finely woven nest above my head but could see neither the baby bird nor its mother. I brought the pieces home. I was a far too sensitive kid to actually steal a bird’s egg before it hatched. The thought would have horrified me, that is if it had ever occurred to me, which it didn’t. But there were other kids in town who did take them. They’d climb trees and stuff their pockets, show their friends, and more often than not end up breaking them against a wall.

A story about egg snatchers appearing today in the Guardian has very little to do with those early memories, but I think there’s a connecting thread between them. A sense of the mystery of birds and of the tempting, jewel-like quality of their eggs. And perhaps, a bit of residual instinct — the egg hunter in action — animates both the robber-oologist and the schoolboy egg thief.

In any case, the Guardian story must be read to be believed:

When the Operation Easter detectives opened the door of the second bedroom in an ordinary house in Cleethorpes last month, they suspected they would find a shoebox or two of wild birds’ eggs. Officers did not imagine they would discover 20 polystyrene fish crates, several biscuit tins and a suitcase, containing a collection of 7,707 eggs. Nestling between layers of cotton wool were the dainty speckled pale green and blue of blackcaps, corn buntings and yellowhammers, just like Cadbury’s mini-eggs; the larger, blotched chestnut red of the osprey; goshawk eggs the colour of the moon. Each aquisition was meticulously recorded in notebooks; each egg painstakingly labelled in spidery black ink and its insides blown out through a tiny hole drilled in its side. For the collector, these dead things had clearly been a life’s work.

Contemporary egg thieves are a peculiar sub-branch of oologsts (egg studiers). Interestingly, some of them leave a trail of journal entries and video recordings documenting their raids. These are later used as evidence in their criminal trials.

Carlton D’Cruze, who kept journals describing how a sea eagle on the Isle of Mull broke one of her own eggs in a desperate attempt to defend her nest from him, received six months in 2002. Anthony Higham, found with video footage showing him stealing red-throated divers’ eggs on the Orkneys, was jailed in 2003.

(link, via The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society)