Most of the bird eggs collected by Britains preëminent natural historians are housed at the Natural History Museum at Tring, forty-five minutes north of London. The Tring museum has the largest zoological collection ever amassed by a single person and is situated on the former estate of its founder, Lord Walter Rothschild, the banker and zoologist, who was famous for driving a zebra-drawn carriage. Rothschild died in 1937; more than two hundred animal species, including a worm, bear his name.
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Oologythe study of eggsis one of the most exciting areas of ornithology and, in many respects, one of the least known, Douglas Russell, the curator of the egg collection at Tring, told me. But Russell, a small, serious man with an orange goatee, was not eager to show me the collection. It has been, he said, completely locked down since 1979, after Mervyn Shorthouse, a regular visitor posing as a wheelchair-bound invalid, stole ten thousand eggs in a three-year period. Id been directed to a side entrance next to a dumpster, where a guard took my bag and identification and escorted me to Russell, who held my passport to my face and gave me a hard stare. That will be kept on file for five years, he said, and led me down an echoing corridor to a photocopier, where he scanned my documents.
