Читать книгу Birds Nesting and Egg Collecting - J. G. Black - Страница 17

Suppose you have taken all my advice, found lots of eggs and brought them home safely. The next thing is to blow them, and a little more advice will perhaps save you some breakages and disappointments. When you start to blow an egg, hold it by the ends between your finger and thumb, for it is stronger that way, and do the whole business over water, so that if you drop it there’s no harm done. Get a good drill, and use it on eggs that don’t matter much till you are pretty sure of yourself. Bore the hole where the egg will naturally balance on it, and opposite to any markings that you particularly want to show. Don’t try to blow eggs with too small a hole, and don’t shove the point of the blowpipe right inside. If yon keep it just outside, the air goes in just as well and the contents come out much better, and you will never burst the egg. Having emptied the egg, squirt in some water, shake it up and blow it out again; and keep on doing this till it comes out as clean as it went in. Wipe the outside lightly with a wet handkerchief, just to remove the dirt but none of the markings, and put it hole-downwards on a piece of blotting-paper to drain. If a yellow stain appears, or the egg tries to stick to the paper, wash it out again.

Now your egg will keep for ever (?), and if you keep a note-book, you can number each nest as you enter it, and put the same number on the egg, just beside the hole; so that you can look it up at any time and find out where it came from, and all about it.

There are two good ways of keeping your eggs. One is to lay them on cotton-wool in a box or cabinet, and the great point about this is that you can easily rearrange them as new ones are added, and keep them in their proper families. The other way is to stick each egg on a card with its number in the corner; the cards can be mounted in cases or drawers, stuck on with paper hinges such as you use for stamps, only bigger, and the cases covered with glass. Your eggs are quite safe once you have got them in, you can see them very well and their numbers too, and they look very neat. In fact there is no better way of showing eggs. The drawback is that when you add to your collection, unless you have left a lot of spaces (and you can never tell just how many specimens of any bird’s eggs you will have) you probably have to unship the whole lot to get them in their places, and it is very easy to break a few in taking them off.

If your eggs are quite clean inside and kept where the light cannot get at them, most of them will keep their colour as long as you like to keep them.