Read an Excerpt

The Most Perfect Thing

Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Climmers and Collectors

Without the knowledge of fowles natural philosophie was very maymed.

Edward Topsell, The Fowls of Heauen or History of Birds (1625)

The huge, sheer limestone cliffs gleam with a startling whiteness in the bright sunlight. Following the sharp edge of the land towards the east you can see the Flamborough headland; to the north lies the holiday town of Filey, and out of sight to the south is Bridlington, another resort. Here on the Bempton cliff top, however, Filey and Bridlington might as well be a hundred miles away, for this is a wild place: benign in the sunshine, but awful on a wet and windy day. On this early summer morning, however, the sun is shining; skylarks and corn buntings are in full song and the cliff tops are ablaze with red campion. The path along the cliff top traces the meandering line that marks the fragile farmland edge and where at each successive promontory a cacophony of sound and smell belches up from below. Out over the cobalt sea birds wheel and soar in uncountable numbers and there are many more in elongated flotillas resting upon the water.

Peering over the edge you see there are thousands upon thousands of birds apparently glued to the precipitous cliffs. The most conspicuous are the guillemots packed tightly together in long dark lines. En masse they appear almost black, but individually in the sun these foot-tall, penguin-like birds are milk-chocolate brown on the head and back, and white underneath. Their dense, velvety head feathers and dark eyes suggest a wonderful gentleness, and they are gentle for much of the time, but if roused they can use their long pointed bill to great effect. Above and below the guillemots are pristine white kittiwakes, kitty-waking and squealing from their excrement-encrusted grassy nests. Less numerous and often concealed in crevices are the razorbills, known locally as tinkers for their sooty dorsal plumage. And, more sparsely still, there are the sea parrots or puffins with their glowing red beaks and feet, and which, like the razorbills, nest out of sight among the limestone fractures. The soundscape is a mix of squeaky soprano kittiwakes overlaying a tenor chorus of growling guillemots, with the occasional high-pitched hum from a contented puffin. And the smell ... well, I love it and its associations, but – and at the risk of muddling my metaphors – it is an acquired taste.

It is June 1935 and at a point known as Staple Newk the vista opens with the breathtaking sight of a man suspended from a 150-foot-long rope over the sea. Swinging precariously out from the sheer limestone face he glides back in towards the rock wall, stops and clings like a crab to the cliff. Watching through field glasses from a safe vantage point on the cliff top is George Lupton, a wealthy lawyer. In his mid-fifties, he is above average height, with a modest moustache, deep-set eyes and a prominent nose: his collar and tie, tweed jacket and manner all signal his affluence. Lupton watches as the man on the rope forces the guillemots to depart in noisy panic, abandoning their precious, pointed eggs, some of which roll away and smash on the rocks below. Most of the remaining eggs are orientated with their pointed end towards the sea. The man on the rope takes them one after another, placing them in his canvas shoulder bag that is already bulging with loot. With the ledge clear of eggs, he pushes off with his feet to swing out and back to another location slightly further along to continue his clumsy plunder. Oblivious of the climber's safety, Lupton is almost beside himself with excitement at what lies inside that canvas bag. On the cliff top three other men sit one behind the other, with the rope secured around their backs, ready when the signal comes to pull like oarsmen until the climmer emerges safely from over the cliff edge.

Yorkshire dialect has reduced these climbers to 'climmers' and past events to cliffs 'clumb'.

George Lupton has travelled by train from his home in Lancashire. He's been here for over a month and, like the other egg collectors, is staying in Bridlington.

On this beautiful morning the cliff tops are busy with people and there is a holiday atmosphere. Little huddles of tourists watch in awe as the climmers descend, dangle and are hauled back up from the rock face with their bounty.

The bag is emptied and the eggs are placed in large wicker baskets. The chalky clunking of the thick-shelled eggs is music to Lupton's ears. The climmer, Henry Chandler, still in his protective policeman's helmet, smiles to himself for he knows that somewhere in his bag is a specimen Lupton desperately wants and is prepared to pay good money for. Identified as the 'Metland egg' and named for the section of cliff owned by the adjacent farm, this distinctively coloured egg – described as a 'brownish ground with a darker reddish brown zone' – has been taken each year from exactly the same spot, a few inches square, since 1911 – for over twenty consecutive years.

George Lupton is obsessed by guillemot eggs. The Metland egg, although special, is one of many. The climmers have known for decades, probably centuries, that female guillemots lay an egg the same colour in precisely the same place year on year. Indeed, the climmers also know that after the first 'pull' – the season's first take of eggs – females will lay an almost identical replacement egg at the same spot a fortnight later. After that is taken they'll lay a third, and very occasionally a fourth. Lupton's lust has meant that in its twenty-year breeding life, the Metland female has never once succeeded in hatching an egg or rearing a chick. The same is true for thousands of guillemots and razorbills along these cliffs, for the climmers farm the eggs here on an industrial scale.

Men have descended Bempton's cliffs to harvest seabird eggs since at least the late 1500s. The farmers whose muddy fields led down to the cliff edge assumed ownership of the 'land' – in reality a fragile rock face – that runs vertically down to the sea below. Gangs of three or four men – comprising a climmer and three anchormen – often several generations of the same family, work the cliffs, year after year, decade after decade.

Initially the eggs were taken for human consumption. They are twice the weight of a hen's egg and are excellent scrambled. Boiled, they are slightly less appealing – at least to me – because the 'white' (the albumen) remains slightly blueish in colour and sets less hard than does that of a hen's egg. This didn't stop guillemot eggs being eaten in unimaginable numbers wherever they were available, not just at Bempton but across the coastal fringes of the entire northern hemisphere. In areas where guillemots bred on low-lying islands, as they do in North America, they were easily exploited and often to local extinction. It was too easy: guillemots breed in such dense aggregations that discovering a colony was like winning the lottery. Eventually, only those birds breeding in the most remote or inaccessible places had any chance of rearing offspring. One of the furthest flung breeding colonies – forty miles off Newfoundland's northeast coast – is Funk Island, a name reflecting the foul (or fowl?) smell emanating from hundreds of thousands of birds. Prior to the discovery of the New World, the Native American Beothuk braved the treacherous seas and paddled out to Funk Island in their canoes to feast on the eggs of guillemots and great auks and on the birds themselves. Their visits were probably infrequent enough to do little harm, but, once European seafarers discovered Funk Island and the other seabird colonies along the north shore of the St Lawrence River in the 1500s, the birds were doomed.

As elsewhere, the Bempton climmers ensured that the eggs they collected were fresh simply by chucking off all the eggs they found on their first visit, and then returning every few days throughout the season to remove the new ones as they appeared. Estimates of the number of eggs taken each year at Bempton are hopelessly variable. Some say more than 100,000, others a few thousand. It was certainly thousands and the best estimates from the 1920s and 1930s, when Lupton was collecting, are annual totals of about 48,000. There were once a lot of guillemots at Bempton, but as egging continued the number of birds inevitably decreased. The decline was accelerated by the creation of the railways – to Bridlington in 1846 and to the village of Bempton itself a year later – providing easy access to those from London and other urban centres seeking the cheap thrill of shooting seabirds. Shooting not only killed and maimed hundreds of birds – mainly guillemots and kittiwakes – but each shot flushed incubating birds from their ledges causing a cascade of eggs on to the rocks or into the sea below.

Lupton was one of several collectors in cahoots with the Bempton climmers. It was a lucrative arrangement for those who risked possible death on the end of a rope since they quickly came to recognise the gleam in the collector's eye and their insatiable passion for particular eggs. Possession was everything and while the collectors bartered with the dimmers they also had to compete with each other. The climming gangs got on well by respecting each other's territorial boundaries, but competition between individual collectors was often intense. One was said to have pulled a gun on another in an argument over a particularly desirable egg.

Sam Robson, born in 1912 and one of the climmers who supplied Lupton with eggs, recounted, with wonderful Yorkshire enunciation, what it was like:

You went by colour a lot, for collectors' eggs: if you saw an unusually marked one, you'd take care o' that, and wait 'till these collectors came. In them days, eggs was same as coin-collecting or summat: they'd get the set, and they used to trade 'em or flog 'em. They used to come all together did collectors: you'd get as high as four or five staying in the village. It was their profession to collect eggs, and sell 'em: a lot of 'em was dealers for other collectors ... So it was more or less like an auction at the cliff top, sometimes ... It was a gamble, what they would pay: you demanded so much and they'd barter you if they could, to beat you down. We took what we could get, because we wanted rid on 'em: we didn't want eggs, we wanted money.

The scale of the climmers' and collectors' activities is all too apparent if you check the catalogues or visit the egg collections of different European and North American museums. Almost without exception, each museum has more eggs from Bempton than almost any other location, including those in their own country. Even the modest teaching museum that I curate in Sheffield has two trays of guillemot eggs dating back to the 1830s, most of which have scrawled on them in semi-legible pencil Bempton, Buckton, Filey, Scarborough and Speeton – all names of locations where eggs were obtained from the Flamborough headland.

I'm Yorkshire born and bred, and when Skomer Island was inaccessible during the winter months of my PhD years, I came to Bempton to see what guillemots get up to during their mysterious out-of-season visits. Leaving my parents' home near Leeds at 3 a.m., I drove through the dark, arriving at the cliffs as it was getting light, just before the guillemots began to fly in from the sea. They would appear very suddenly en masse in the half-light and their noisy ensemble sounded like a celebration, and that's what it was: a raucous, rapturous meeting of partners and neighbours – guillemots reunited.

It was always unbelievably cold on these visits, usually with a strong wind whipping in off the North Sea forcing me to huddle below the cliff top in a pathetic attempt to retain some body heat. Notebook in hand and peering through my retina-wrecking Hertel & Reuss telescope, I kept notes on the birds' activities, thrilled by what was – and still is – an extraordinary wildlife spectacle. In contrast to the birds, for me this was an intensely solitary experience since at that time there was no reserve building, no car park and no people – especially in midwinter. I have an immense affinity for Bempton and indeed for the entire Flamborough headland whose history oozes and drips into my imagination like the guillemot guano from the cliffs themselves. I particularly like the fact that between them the climmers and collectors – amateur ornithologists – created the scientific foundations of guillemot biology.

In Lupton's day climming was a tourist spectacle and you could buy postcards in the nearby resorts showing the climmers dangling on the end of a rope or with basketfuls of eggs on the cliff top, with captions like 'a good bag' or 'a good pull'. Climming was also a business catering to a varied clientele, from the casual visitor who merely wanted a guillemot egg as a souvenir, to the more daring tourist – mostly women, apparently – who went over the edge to collect an egg for themselves, to the fanatical collectors like Lupton patrolling like a predator along the cliff top and waiting impatiently for the climmers to produce unusual specimens. Lupton even allowed his eleven-year-old daughter Patricia to be lowered over the edge to collect eggs for herself.

Guillemot eggs are extraordinary in many different ways, but especially in size, colour and pattern. Most early writers said that no two were alike and it was this seemingly infinite variety of colour that mesmerised George Lupton. He was not alone. Dozens of collectors were greedy for guillemot eggs, but Lupton was unusual in being the only collector, or oologist, as they called themselves, to focus almost his entire nervous energy, and the contents of his wallet, on the guillemot's ovarian output. Another Bempton collector, George Rickaby of Nottingham, in 1934 described Lupton's collection of over a thousand unusual guillemot eggs as being 'the world's best'.

The 1930s, when Lupton, Rickaby and others were active along the Bempton cliff tops, was the heyday of egg collecting in Britain. We look back on those times with both wonder and dismay. Once deemed a harmless part of every country boy's childhood that occasionally swelled into an adult preoccupation, egg collecting is now unacceptable and illegal. The irony is that in the past egg collecting was just one of many ways of connecting with nature. For individuals like Lupton who failed to outgrow their juvenile pursuit, egg collecting became an obsession. He sold his collection of guillemot eggs a decade before the Protection of Birds Act of 1954 made criminals out of those who had previously been mere eccentrics.

Collecting birds' eggs began in the 1600s when physicians, savants and others interested in the natural world started to acquire artefacts and create cabinets of curiosities. Among the first of these was the great Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, whose museum opened in 1617. His collection contained – among many other things – an ostrich egg, amazing for its sheer size, but also several monstrously large and deformed hen's eggs. Also part of his collection was an oversized (presumably double-yolked) goose egg and an egg from a hen that had once been a cockerel.

Another Renaissance man who had eggs in his cabinet was Thomas Browne, a brilliant physician based in Norwich, England. Browne's wide range of interests included the new scientific natural history, and among his many achievements was the first account of the birds of Norfolk. After visiting Browne in 1671, John Evelyn, writer, gardener and contemporary of Samuel Pepys, reported in his diary on 18 October 1671:

Next morning I went to see Sir Thomas Browne (with whom I had sometime corresponded by letters tho never saw before) whose whole house & garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities, & that of the best collection, especialy medails, books, plants, natural things, did exceedingly refresh me after last nights confusion: Sir Thomas had amongst other curiosities, a collection of the eggs of all foul and birds he could procure, that country (especialy the promontorys of Norfolck) being (as he said) frequented with the severall kinds, which seldome or never, go farther into the land, as cranes, storkes, eagles etc. and a variety of water-foule.

---

Excerpted from The Most Perfect Thing by Tim Birkhead. Copyright © 2016 Tim Birkhead. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---