A friend of mine sent me an article from The Daily Mail newspaper yesterday about the death of a notorious “egger” who had fallen 40′ out of a tree after losing his footing. The story was already doing the rounds when I recieved it and had appeared on several internet bird forums, usually with gleeful comments along the lines of “Serves the b*****d right” attached.

I must admit my first reaction had been similar - egg-collecting is destructive, serves no useful purpose, and it seems to me can’t be justified on any grounds whatsoever: as pastimes go, it’s right down there with badger-baiting and driving 4×4s through national parks - but my friend (a retired teacher) had headed his mail “Some Blog Fodder: a moral dilemma - discuss.” (have we all got friends who set them essay questions, incidentally, or is it just me?).

Anyway - as it was intended to do - his question set me thinking and for those of you with nothing else to read, my thoughts (composed during a quiet section of a flight from London to Hong Kong) are outlined below.

First of all though, using excerpts from The Times and The Daily Mail, here’s an abridged and amalgamated version of the article:

If the article is to be believed, Mr Watson seems to have been egg-collecting for most of his life. He’d come into contact with the RSPB, the police, magistrates, the courts - but still he went on “plundering” nests and making a nuisance of himself. Pretty much open and shut case then: persistent egger (boo) falls out of tree (hurrah) and dies (no comment, don’t want to offend anyone, but you know what we all think etc etc)

But is there more to this story? On the face of it, it’s a sorry tale of years of greed and a life devoted to being a one-man walking environmental disaster, but if you read the whole article again you’ve got to start to ask the question: just who’s at fault here? And the uncomfortable answer I’ve ended up with is: a lot more people than just Mr Watson.

After all, there are two questions that are just begging to be answered: what got Mr Watson started on his ‘collecting’, and what were his incentives to stop?

These days egg-collecting is - rightly - illegal and discouraged, but back in the 1950s (when Mr Watson was a teenager) egg-collecting was almost a “what we did in the summer holidays” tradition. Everyone was at it. My friend (the retired teacher) did it, Bill Oddie - now a much loved and well-known birder and tv ‘personality’ - was on the television only the other night saying that he did it, my father and your father probably did it (my grandfather certainly did - I remember once being lovingly shown his huge collection of eggs neatly arranged in polished cabinets)…Collecting birds’ eggs was how youngsters discovered nature, learnt a bit of field-craft, got close to birds. There were no affordable binoculars or telescopes of course, and ‘field-guides’ came by the set rather than the single volumes we have now: egg collecting was most people’s natural history education.

And there was no shortage of birds either: the UK’s human population was 10 million less than it is today, towns were smaller and more compact, the first motorways were yet to slice through our countryside, the numbers of cats prowling our gardens were a fraction of what they are now, farming had yet to go through its ‘DDT with everything’ and monoculture phases, and the demands for more and more land for “recreation” were still a long way off. What harm could a bit of egg-collecting do?

I don’t know for sure of course, but I’m willing to bet that this was the sentiment little Colin grew up with. And who would have discouraged him? There was no mass ‘green movement’ to point out the overall impact thousands upon thousands of teenage egg-collectors would be having on bird populations, very few educators at the time were concerned with the environment, and there was no television to quickly and effectively promote this concern even if it had existed. If you think about it from a 21st century perspective, the truth is that almost no-one cared about the environment, discussed it, or thought about their personal impact on it. These things all came much later: to a great extent they’re still developing of course. In case we’re feeling a little smug though, in fifty years time aren’t people going to wonder why global warming and species mass-extinctions weren’t discussed as a matter of urgent priority in schools and the media in the year 2006?

Surely though, the 1950s are a long way behind us? By 2006 ‘little Colin’ was a whole lot bigger, yet unlike many of his contemporaries he was (allegedly, my lud) still collecting eggs. He must have known it was wrong. Perhaps he did, who knows, but consider three facts:

• Who can say what is right and wrong when hunting (ie killing) birds is still widespread; when many people still principally think of birds as something to eat; when nothing is done at Government level to halt a huge trade in captive birds, including in rare birds of prey; when our brand new energy policy consists of building wind-turbines in areas where some of them will certainly kill eagles; when our nature reserves and national parks are so under-resourced they aren’t even properly wardened most of the time? Does anyone outside the narrow world of birders and conservationists really give a damn about birds? It doesn’t seem like it…
• He was arrested many times, but he doesn’t appear to have been jailed and the fines he was given were pretty trivial really - easily covered by selling a few prize specimens. What does that say about the value put on ‘rare birds’ by the law, the politicians we vote for, and - by extension - by society?
• It must have been obvious to anyone who came into contact with Watson that the man was obsessed with egg-collecting: he was diagnosably ill. What was done to help him? What resources were at hand to re-educate him? I suspect virtually nothing, and whatever was available wasn’t very effective, because he - literally - kept right on egging to the very end.

It doesn’t add up to strong condemnation and an incentive to stop does it?

Consider something else too: who was out in the field to stop him collecting? There are some tremendously dedicated volunteers on “egg-watch” these days but I’ve never done wardening work - I’m not sure I personally know anyone who has. And how much money do I actually put into egg theft prevention? Not a lot. I’d never thought about it until today but it’s no use complaining that Mr Watson and his odious chums “kept getting away with it” if the people who say they care actually rarely donate their time or money to stop the eggers in their tracks. But that’s why we pay our subs to the RSPB etc isn’t it? Really. Just how far is the RSPB supposed to stretch the 48GBP/89USD a family is asked to pay in membership fees annually? 48GBP is a night out for two at a mid-priced restaurant if you go easy on the wine. 48GBP won’t even fill up the average family saloon with petrol for a long-distance twitch. It’s less than the cost of the Helm guide to the Sylvia Warblers for God’s sake…

I’m not for one instant condoning egg-collecting or forgiving egg-collectors - I hope the rotten lot of them fall out of a tree and at the very least break their bloody legs - but my friend asked me whether I could see a “moral dilemma” in this story, and I have to say that I can: Mr Watson, if I’m being spectacularly generous, was a misguided individual engaged in a practice I despise, but I do have to admit that if I’m going to gloat over his downfall I also have to admit that I did virtually nothing to stop him other than condemn him in private…