Hello everyone ,
today I’m gonna bring you a story about collections. You must remember this time frame was nearly 50 years ago and times were do different.
We didn’t have PlayStation or anything like that in fact early on we didn’t even have a TV . Eventually we got one. It was a Rank Arena dial knob TV which had channel 7 channel 9 channel 10 and channel 2. That was it in black-and-white.
We weren’t really allowed to watch telly in the daytime.
Mum will make us all go outside for the whole day except for meal times.
So you had to make your own fun and as you understand I had three luxury of the bush out the back to muck around in , but still a day takes a lot to fill in even as a child.
So as kids go then most kids that I knew, had collections, some had coin collections, some had stamp collections; some had card collections, you name it kids collected it.
Most boys and some of the girls I knew had birds egg collections.
They were collections of different types of birds eggs that have been collected and blown and stored away in a safe place because they were quite fragile.
So we will go bird nesting whenever took our fancy and collect eggs the most common eggs back then were blackbird eggs starters eggs and Indian minor eggs . So it didn’t take long to collect those types of eggs.
Now there was some really hard to get eggs that would really valuable because you could swap eggs like you could swap football cards at school and you could swap a blue crane egg for a duck and a pheasant and a Finch egg..
So I started to build my collection pretty early on at a young age. My biggest advantage was me having the bush and the Sand dunes right behind my house.
All my eggs that I collected I would keep in Chook egg cartons with cotton wool in the bottom like a soft cushion and then packed around each individual egg, thenI would write on the top of the carton just what egg was where .
And then that container of eggs will be kept safely under my bed.
So when I stared egg collecting , I quickly collected the easy eggs to get ,the smallest one would’ve been a Finch which were white eggs with speckled brown spots ,for kids that was a great hobby and on a day out , me and probably four mates would head over to the old mine building across from
Donmix Powerhouse
because at that time it was in a lot better condition and it wasn’t fenced off to the public. So we would all climb up onto the structure and start collecting our eggs. All of us will collect probably fifty eggs each
each and then take a good vantage hiding spot behind some timbers and all get into position we then start and all out war.
There was eggs flying everywhere around us and every now and then you took a hit just because that’s what happened when we finished our eggs. We might even have another round.
When it was time to go and we had to head to the railway line we had to stay low crawl past the caretakers house because old
Nobby Smith. The caretaker was rumoured to shoot at boys doing what we had just done.
So that would be it for that day until next time.
One of the downturns of egg collecting was when you climbed up a big tree to reach your birds nest besides maybe getting swooped and hit by a magpie when you found the nest with the eggs to carry them back down the tree you put them inside your mouth to keep them safe.
This is all well and good until you’re coming down and maybe a magpie swoops again or you just slip and you hit under your chin on a branch then all of a sudden you got a mouthful the smashed birds, egg and shell to contend with it doesn’t taste that nice trust me.
But it was warm.
One of the most interesting egg collecting days , I had to mates that had told me about partalopes , which were a small finch type bird that nest in sand dunes in tiny little nests in the wall the sand , so we went to the sand dunes out the back and we’re looking for them. I didn’t really believe them until they found the first nest and then I took a closer look. They were in a hole no bigger than my little finger and what you did was open up the hole and put your whole forearm deep into the hidden tunnel and find the eggs , my mate assured me that this is all good until you come across a snake. It’s already beaten you there,
thank goodness there was no snakes that day but lots of partalope eggs.
So eventually my egg collection was pretty cool, and I had collected most of the available eggs and swapped for the ones I never got some people even went as far wading out in swamps full of water just to get a water hens egg.
So I’ve got home with a few new birds eggs and it doesn’t matter what type and what size they are. To keep them properly you need to blow that egg. This is an interesting process where you get like a needle and you pick a hole in the bottom of the egg and a small hole in the top you get a bowl or outside on the grass and you put that egg in your mouth and you blow her out as hard as you can. You do hope that this egg is only recently fertilised because if it isn’t yet try and blow out a thicker fluid. Sometimes during this process the egg would smash and you will get a mouthful of whatever was in it so it’s not for the faint hearted to blow eggs.
I can’t remember how old I was probably 13or 14 when I stopped bird nesting but I believe nature was much happier. It just goes to show how times have changed the things I had to do growing up to keep entertained and nothing like PlayStation Nintendo 64 game boy all the stuff we had none but we spent a lot of time socialising their neighbours because they’re all in the same boat and ended up building lifelong friendships just by association some of my neighbours. I see maybe every now and then it’s great to say hello. You can’t do that with the PlayStation.
So I hope this story doesn’t leave me with egg on my face.
Ps the last egg that I blew was about 2 years ago actually I blew three abandoned emu eggs,
a friend told me that she knew where there was an old emu nest , so we went out on ann adventure exploring the bush together, we came across the old emu nest in a clearing it was surprisingly quiet large a mound carefully made up of grass sticks and leaves about 3 metres in circumference.
There were three old eggs left behind in the abandoned nest and I looked them up later on the internet and the male looks after and incubates the eggs and he knows if they are going to hatch or not so these three that he left were actually infertile eggs ,
we took to then home and even though it had been over forty years since I had blown an egg I remembered how .
I took the three eggs out to my backyard and I picked my holes and started to blow , it was so much bigger than any egg I had blown in the past but once I got it going it was ok and I emptied it ,
The second one was not quite silo good as it had a bad oder when I picked the holes in fact the shells were that thick and hard that I actually drilled them with my cordless drill.
Well this one stunk bad so obviously it was once growing inside the shell so l put my lips to the smell and I blew and blew and all of a sudden most of it came out fast and the wind blew the stinking rotten mess all over me , I started dry reaching it was that bad so I hosed it all down with water .
In hindsight you just put the egg like that with the two holes in It , on top of an ants nest and they will clean it out for you .
The third egg blew well and then I hit the shower for a well earned wash .
Cheers xxx
Curlyg