Long before Pokémon GO or Footy Cards existed, the biggest collecting mania was bird eggs! 

The WA Museum is home to one of the largest collections of bird eggs in Australia with more than 40,000 clutches! Although less than 25 per cent of the Museum’s egg collection is currently registered, teams of dedicated volunteers are working to register the remaining 30,000+ clutches as part of the Legacy Collection Project. 

Oology, the study of bird eggs, was historically undertaken by private collectors during the 18th and 19th centuries. However, in the mid 1900’s, laws enacted to protect wildlife banned hobbyist egg collecting and interest in the practise fizzled out, leaving many collectors to donate their eggs to museums.

Beginning in the Victorian Era, esteemed gentlemen, and naturalists along with large museums throughout Europe, America, England, and Australia sought to possess the most rare and difficult to obtain bird eggs for their prized collections and research. From an outsider's perspective, an egg collection may have merely served to provide bragging rights and prestige for their often-wealthy owner. However, those who kept the collections viewed themselves not as mere collectors but as "oologists", serious men of science who studied eggs to further inform the field of ornithology, the wider study of birds. 

Fortunately for the birds, egg-collecting largely fell out of fashion during the mid-1900s after the scientific community began to question the value of oology and the shrinking of particular-bird populations due to unscrupulous collecting became more widely known to the public. Pressure from conservation groups led to the protection of wild birds in many places around the world and nowadays those interested in the field of ornithology are more conscientious of animal welfare and typically observe birds with cameras and binoculars. Consequently, many private egg collections ceased to expand, lost much of their prestige and are now being donated to museums so that they may be studied and preserved in perpetuity. 

Using modern technologies such as DNA and stable isotope analyses, eggshells can provide information about past population sizes, climatic conditions, species distributions, effects of pollution and bird evolution! This turns the collections donated to the Museum into time capsules that provide researchers with a view of past bird populations and how they’ve changed over time. 

Most of the eggs in the WA Museum’s collection were donated to the Museum after being carefully collected and privately arranged by Nicholas Kolichis, Tony Bush, Geoff Lodge and the estates of the late Terry Allen, Peter Mortimer, and Ivan Carnaby. Once registered in the Museum’s database, the eggs and their associated data can be made accessible to visiting researchers who may wish to study them in hope of answering important questions about bird biology. So, in a way, the eggs of the past will help to conserve the birds of the future.