Bird Egg Collection

[Jim Ford]

Someone I knew where I used to work often went rough shooting. On a Monday I used to ask him how he got on and he often said he saw just a couple of pheasants, but didn't shoot them because there weren't enough around. Conversely, his wife's relations were Spanish, and when he visited them and they went shooting, his companions would shoot anything that moved on the basis that if they didn't bag the creatures, someone else would!

Jim

[feathered-friend]

DuncanE reference your quote - Careful where you go in France in hunting seasons you may end up gettting shot, stuffed and mounted.

You're not wrong ! Actually I already asked a French friend about this,concerned about the possibility of being shot, she did not inspire me with confidence!

The thing is to make sure you do not walk on private land, keep to public places. Think I'll just stick to the garden

Regarding the original question when I was young in the 70's and 80's we used to love going blackberry picking and conkering in the countryside.

[DuncanE]

Originally Posted by feathered-friend

The thing is to make sure you do not walk on private land, keep to public places. Think I'll just stick to the garden

I hope you're not bordering farmland, just being in the garden might not stop them.

I seem to remeber friends of mine who live between Angers and Laval said they wouldn't go out if the hunters were nearby.

[JoulesH]

I think we forget that with the luxury of fantastic cameras, we can record very accurately what we see, whether for education, scientific record, for ID or just 'for art' or pleasure. When many of the great Victorian collections of stuffed animals were put together they had a great educational role and were the only practical alternative to studying live animals or those killed specially for capture. Egg collecting was very popular in the mid 20C and I know that this is the way that so many youngsters became interested in birds and wider wildlife. In Leics there have been many naturalists recorded for an oral history archive a year or so ago and many 'confessed' that they became interested through egg collecting when it was legal to do so.
Contemporary taxidermists are usually very ethical and want to know the provenance of anything that they are asked to stuff. I would actually quite like a few modern GB pieces of taxidermy as long as I knew that they had been ethically sourced.