The precise location of the rugged North Atlantic outcrop upon which the egg in front of him was laid, and the identity of the collector who climbed in among the rocks to claim it, remain a mystery. History has forgotten what happened before the egg was placed on the table at a London auction house and Viscount de Barde raised his hand. The known provenance of this egg begins at the moment when it became private property, as the auctioneer’s gavel came down on the table in the Year of our Lord 1795.
Now that very same egg is lying in a box on Grönvall’s desk, but a hundred and fifty years ago it was the happy nobleman who held it in his hands. Viscount de Barde is thrilled at his purchase, though the price rose higher than he would have liked. The great auk’s eggs are valuable indeed because they are things of such rare beauty, some with dark spots, others with wavy lines, each of them unique. Auk’s eggs are fascinating in their own right, and the auk itself is a fascinating creature, a strange bird whose body, standing three feet tall, features atrophied limbs, more like flippers than wings, meaning that the auk doesn’t fly but swims instead, and its Welsh namepen gwyn, “white head”, gradually gave rise to the standard name for the black-and-white inhabitants of Antarctica. There has been a shortage of auk’s eggs recently, the birds have retreated to ever more remote islands, and the prices have gone throughthe roof, but de Barde raises his hand irrespective. He wants this egg because it is so beautiful, and de Barde isn’t just a collector; he is a renowned painter too. He has resolved to visually record the contents of his natural history collection, and to this end he fills canvases with arrangements of minerals, conch shells and vases from Antiquity, and in the corner of one of his paintings depicting the avian world, he immortalises the auk’s egg.
In de Barde’s painting, the auk’s egg rests under various stuffed birds, leaning against the breathtaking eggs of the cassowary and the ostrich, but soon after completing the canvas, the viscount shakes off his mortal coil, and his collection is acquired by the natural history museum of Boulogne. And because de Barde had the extraordinary good fortune to own not one, not two but three great auk eggs, the museum is willing to barter and exchange one of the eggs for an ostrich skin. The ostrich or “camel crane” is delivered to the museum by one Thomas Henry Potts, the son of an arms manufacturer who is more interested in birds and lizards than in calibres and gunpowder. He bequeaths the museum an ostrich, accepting an auk’s egg as payment, but Potts cannot enjoy his acquisition for long as, shortly after sealing the deal, he leaves England and settles in New Zealand. There he can forget the stink of the arms factory and his father’s hopes that he might one day take it over, and instead devote himself to the study of nature, though alas he is forced to leave his collection behind.
And so the egg finds itself on an auctioneer’s table once again, and this time it is Lord Garvagh who bids the highest. Grönvall shudders with empathy as he thinks of Lord Garvagh’sfootman. Perhaps he was dusting his master’s collection, and this was why he lifted the egg from its velvet cushion. Perhaps the footman wanted to examine it against the light filtering in through the library window – this miniature work of art, shaped like a pear – and for a brief moment he understood the folly that had made the nobleman pay the price of a house for a single egg, but as he recalled the egg’s value, he rushed to return it to its rightful place.
It’s as though he sees the accident before it happens. First, he walks in the wrong direction. The effect is evident before the cause, and the footman sees the egg rolling out of his hand long before the lid of the glass cabinet slips from his fingers, he watches it falling through the air and witnesses the moment its fragile calcium shell strikes the lacquered, hardwood floor.
From this moment onwards, the egg is known for this man’s clumsiness. History has forgotten the bird that laid this egg and the name of the man who plucked it from its nest, but it will not forget the hands that let it slip. The egg becomes known as Lord Garvagh’s Footman’s Egg, and the footman lost his job because of it. We don’t know what happened to him after he was fired, but we can be sure he didn’t come away with a glowing recommendation. The loss he caused is immeasurable, for while this particular egg travelled between the collections of three men, the species that laid it departed this world for good.
There was a time when the great auk dotted the shores around the North Atlantic. It was a tasty bird, its feathers made plump pillows, its body was so oily that it burned like a lantern, and where there was a shortage of wood, a canny fishermanwould set an auk ablaze on the fire. Fishing and coastal communities had used the auk and its eggs for food through the centuries, until a new continent was discovered, the miraculous Americas, making longer and more difficult sea journeys necessary. Crossing the Atlantic required great stores of provisions, and this great wingless bird was easy prey: in his memoirs, the explorer Jacques Cartier mentions that, in barely the space of half an hour, an expedition off Newfoundland succeeded in hunting so many auks that they needed two longboats to carry their carcasses.
But these days of plenty did not last forever. After a few hundred years of crossing the Atlantic, the great auk is already a rarity, and this is when collectors become interested in the auk and its eggs. Curators begin to compete with fishermen for the few birds that remain. The auk lays only one egg every summer, and if that egg ends up in the hands of a poacher, the bird will leave its nest and return to the sea without any offspring. In 1844, a group of fishermen come across a pair of auks on a small island off the Icelandic coast. They wring the delicious birds’ necks, and with that the auks are gone, so abruptly that not a single naturalist has a chance to publish a comprehensive study of the species, and suddenly nobody can remember how the auk called out to its young.
The great auk joins the sea cow in that unenviable group of species extinguished by human hands, and even if, by some miracle, the footman could repay Lord Garvagh the sum he had paid for the egg, that too would be cold comfort. No amount of gold can recreate the egg of an extinct bird, and Lord Garvaghkneels on the floor and gathers up the scattered fragments, swallowing back the tears and rage.
The egg in front of Grönvall is cracked. Someone has tried to repair it, but the work is so cack-handed that, rather than hide what happened, the repair job serves only to emphasise the accident that once befell the egg. Time has yellowed the glue used to put the pieces back together. The shell’s surface is smeared in thick adhesive, suggesting that the conservator summoned by Lord Garvagh wasn’t used to restoring eggs. Few people are, as putting eggs back together is a troublesome job requiring careful fingers, steady hands and endless reserves of patience, all qualities that this particular conservator clearly lacked, and after the accident the egg loses most of its value. Nonetheless, it still attracts interest on the market as the great auk left behind only seventy-five eggs, all blown empty, a finite corpus over which collectors can outbid each other, and as prices rise, even the footman’s egg finds a buyer.
The industrial magnate Ragnar Kreuger, a most enthusiastic collector of rare eggs, finally acquires one of those seventy-five specimens for his collection. What a purchase! One hundred and seventy-five pounds sterling for the egg of an extinct bird, whereas a great auk’s egg in pristine condition recently achieved the dizzying price of $180,000 at auction. Kreuger might even have paid such an amount, but the Americans got there first, and he settles for the footman’s egg, and while rival collectors might scoff at his purchase, Kreuger’s smile does not fade, for in his employ he has a man who knows how to make a broken egg immaculate once again.
Kreuger began by buying up the most significant Finnish egg collections. Soon he had acquired examples of all domestic species, their beautiful, fragile eggs, though he doesn’t stop there, but picks up the bird atlas, lists the species still missing from his collection, and sends letters to the relevant collectors and merchants. His collection begins to grow, but he is a busy man. He acquires more eggs but doesn’t have the time to get his acquisitions in order. He must make water flow beneath the city, design drainage systems and filtration plants, oversee extensive infrastructure projects around the country and the world. He might not have time, but he certainly has plenty of money, and this he uses to buy even more birds’ eggs, and his drawers and cabinets fill with evidence of trees scaled, swamps traversed, jungles conquered. The shelves sag with parcels sent from all corners of the globe, their contents still waiting to be catalogued: he needs a curator for his collection, and he wants the best that money can buy.
Kreuger writes to the ornithological association to ask, who is the best egg collector and conservator in the business? The secretary does not hesitate: when it comes to restoring eggs, the preparator John Grönvall is second to none. The Museum of Zoology hired him to paint dioramas and mend equipment, but it soon transpires that his true calling lies in restoring delicate specimens. He has an excellent eye and precise hands. He can take birds worn away over the decades and return the gleam to their feathers, the yellow hue to a blackbird’s beak, and when it comes to working with brittle eggshells, he is more skilled than anyone else.
Grönvall sits in the oology museum and inspects the egg of this extinct creature. He imagines the bird that laid it, the curious northern penguin, and a sadness descends upon him. Might the auk have been saved if the collectors had stopped for a moment to think about why the birds’ numbers were dwindling? But the disappearance of one bird doesn’t arouse much interest. It is true that bird species die out in every corner of the globe – the great auk on the shores of Europe, Steller’s spectacled cormorant in the Bering Sea – but collectors don’t seem concerned, one swallow does not a summer make, the great flightless birds were exceptions, a melancholy anomaly in a thriving world of birds, and the hunters and collectors carry on their work without a care in the world.
Collecting rare eggs is a gentleman’s pursuit, a refined pastime through the annals of natural history. Generations of schoolmasters have taught children to find and revere eggshells, and the ranks of eminent egg collectors continue to swell, for few can walk past an egg resting in its nest without admiration and a desire to possess it. But collectors very quickly tick off the most common species. Then their attention turns to rarities, birds that live in the wilderness and avoid human contact, birds whose nesting places are a closely guarded secret. They forget about gulls and thrushes. They want to acquire the eggs of gyrfalcons and snowy owls, auks and tropical parrots, and they are prepared to pay good money for them, and where there is money, there is always someone willing to sell. Farmers and hunters scale remote promontories and climb high into the boughs of trees, then deliver the eggs to the middlemen, andauctioneers sell the nobility happiness plucked from a nest. In the farmer’s hand, the egg becomes a currency, food for his hungry children, while in the gentlemen’s salons carpenters build cabinets to house the wonders of the avian world. The collections grow, and the harder it becomes to find a gyrfalcon’s egg, the more collectors are willing to pay.
Over time, the first notes of discord begin to sound – does the choir of birds sound fainter in the spring, do flocks of migratory birds in the autumn look smaller, thinner, maybe boys shouldn’t be taught how to find their nests – but people laugh at such concerns, do you really think the quick fingers of a few rascals can drive a species to extinction, and catalogues of ever greater selections of birds’ eggs continue to fall through the letterboxes of those for whom money is no object.
Eventually, the birds disappear, which brings a tear to the eye of even the most nonchalant watchers of the skies. The passenger pigeon was deemed to be the most abundant bird in America, perhaps in the whole world. You will have heard the stories: a flock of passenger pigeons might take fourteen hours to pass, even an amateur would be able to spear a dozen of them, while a skilled hunter could take out up to sixty birds with a single shot, and three and a half thousand birds could end up in the hunter’s nets in a single session. What a banquet, what a bacchanal! But then such feasts come to an end. The last wild passenger pigeon is shot dead in Illinois on a rainy day in November 1901, and suddenly the skies are empty, a supposedly infinite bird has been hunted to extinction.
The passenger pigeon is gone, and the discord escalates. Ifa bird like that can disappear, are any of them safe? Nature has its limits, and people’s blitheness is slowly replaced with fears of a time of scarcity, of dwindling reserves, but the egg market continues to rattle along regardless. For traders, the idea that the age of plenty may soon be coming to an end is the best possible news: the rarer the species, the more they can ask, and prices for auk’s eggs and fragments of the sea cow’s bones continue to rise. In Finland, hunters and collectors shrug their shoulders – surely we’re nothing compared to the insatiable Americans – but gradually the evidence becomes irrefutable: the birds of the north are disappearing too, and it isn’t fate or disease that is claiming them but the greedy hand of man, and confronted with this fact is none other than the preparator John Grönvall.
John sketches the horizon in his jotter. It is his and Gio’s turn to be lazy. Frecko and Harald are taking care of steering the boat, and Gio has a jotter in his lap too. All four brothers are skilled illustrators, competing with one another to be the best, watching to see which of them can make the finest drawing of the birds and plants in the yard, though the winner is rarely clear. Gio’s pictures are the most beautiful, John’s the most accurate, and at some point Frecko gives up and turns his attention to photography, gets his hands on a large, heavy machine and records light on glass, but today they are not competing. They have set out early in the morning, gathering up their equipment as soon as the sun peered above thehorizon and heading down to the shore. The brothers’ belongings are heavy, but their minds are light. School is closed, their father is at sea and their mother spends all day washing guests’ backs at the bathhouse, it is summer, and they have a boat; they are free. The wind catches their sails, Gio starts to sing, his voice mingling with the calls of the seagulls.
Their destination is Aspskär, a cluster of four islands, a miniature world out in the open water. They choose Aspskär because it is home to an old fishing hut that Estonian fishermen once built to offer protection from the elements. Nowadays, the hut is nothing but a battered old shack, but it will give them shelter for the night, and they have brought timber to mend the new holes that winter has left in the roof. After a little bit of renovation, the hut will provide them with some perfectly decent lodgings, and when rough winds whistle through the walls, they will huddle under their blankets, light the storm lanterns and boil water for tea, and nothing could be more perfect.
They approach the island, and razorbills greet their boat. The birds land amid the waves with a squawk, and the boys note down their numbers. They are adept at identifying the species living on the island, razorbills, great cormorants, black guillemots, nimble skuas, they learn their Latin names and test one another on them, and as summer draws on, the birds get to know them too. The first time the boys step ashore, they take flight, swoop above the boys’ heads, trying to draw their attention away from the fledglings waddling among the rocks, but they leave the nests and the young in peace, and soon the birds learn not to fear them.
On their excursions, they only ever shoot a few birds and gather a few eggs. The four mostly live on fish and the provisions they have brought with them, preserves and crispbread, and any birds they shoot, they use most carefully. They keep the skins, and during the long winter months they use their prey for practice – every self-respecting artist should know how to reconstruct a bird – arranging a frame under the feathers to imitate a living creature. And when the sea is cold and the birds have flown away, they sketch the cormorants and seagulls posing on their windowsill. It is the only way to see a bird up close. No living winged creature would allow an artist near enough to draw the feather patterns around the beak or the streaks running along the sides.
All four of them have learned how to collect and blow eggs at school, but when it comes to these finds, John is more competent and diligent than anyone else, and when Harald throws away a Eurasian oystercatcher egg after it cracked when he was trying to drill a hole in it, John picks up the pieces and patiently puts them together again, restoring the specimen to its former glory. He joins the fragments together with a set of pincers, a magnifying glass and endless reserves of patience, and once the fragile jigsaw is finally ready, he hides the cracks where two pieces have been joined together. There is no glue in the world quite the same colour as the oystercatcher’s brown eggs, but John mixes colours together until he finds just the right hue, so that his handiwork can no longer be distinguished from nature’s own perfection.
The boat glides closer to the island’s shore, and theirexcitement is great. They have been waiting for this day since the last time they left Aspskär: their first summer’s day on the island. They carefully steer their boat towards land and tie the ropes to the rings sunk into the rock. The weather is glorious: a south-easterly wind pushes scum towards the shoreline, the ryegrass sways in the breeze and the chive flowers gleam against the stones. A day like this will give John enough energy to carry him through the black winter mornings; but now, as he stands on the rocks along the shoreline, happiness will not come. They haven’t had time to count the nests, but they can see right away that there are only a handful, fewer with every visit. The island should be full of sounds, squawks and feathers, but now there are only a couple of nervous seagulls swooping above them. John runs his shoe back and forth across the bullet shells left scattered on the ground. Brass scratches against rock.
Fishermen have always hunted birds, gathered eggs for their pans and feathers to pad their coats. Local crofters aren’t allowed to hunt on private landowners’ grounds, but if it’s only a spot of shooting, the gamekeepers tend to look the other way. Now the gamekeepers are gone too. The lords of the manor move to the cities and sell off their land, and suddenly anyone can get their hands on a motorboat and head out to the islands with a gleaming new rifle. Aspskär was always renowned for the abundance of its bird life, and now that abundance has attracted the hunters. The results are appalling. They count the remaining birds, and the numbers committed to their jotters make for sombre reading. Worse still, their island is no exception. More and more hunters have discovered the easy prey onthese islands, and with each passing autumn fewer fledglings take flight from these rugged outcrops.
They return from the island quiet and downcast. John is sitting in the kitchen, fresh migratory statistics from the ornithological association in his hands. He looks at the numbers, then glances up at the stuffed birds on the windowsill, the great cormorant he immortalised and Gio’s guillemot, and places his cup on the table. The coffee has turned bitter in his mouth. Frecko invites him out for a spot of fishing, but he shakes his head and concentrates on his plans, and when his brothers return with a pike, he beckons them into the kitchen. These last few days John has been quieter than usual, spent his time alone, thinking, rummaging in boxes, but now he picks up a beautiful black bound folder bearing the ominous wordsBird Protection on Aspskärand places it on the table.
That evening, they form an association. John has no need to coax his brothers into it. They each felt the same anxiety upon seeing the nests kicked to pieces. Frecko collects all the photographs he took on the island, Harald reads up on legal matters and Gio, who has a way with words, writes to newspapers and meets with local leaders and politicians. And each of them goes door to door with the folder that John compiled, showing the residents of Loviisa the islands of Aspskär and the beauty of its resident birds.
The campaign is a success. The fishermen find it within their hearts to protect the islands. Their love of birds is all the greater because so many of them make a little money selling moonshine on the side. In the dark hours of the night, Finnish and Estonianfishermen meet one another far out at sea, and boxes change hands. The fishermen would be more than happy if the coastguard were to turn their attention from the bootleggers to the sawmills, from the factories to the hooligans and their rifles, and they sign the brothers’ petition without a moment’s hesitation.
The residents of Loviisa are amenable to their project and donate funds, but Harald has scrutinised the letter of the law, and he has bad news for his brothers. The President can decide that any part of state land can be cordoned off and turned into a nature reserve to keep its flora and fauna untouched. But Aspskär is not state land. The landowner could apply for permission to protect his own land too, but a private decision to protect the land needs the permission of the local governor, and it is widely known that the governor upon whose desk this application would arrive is a keen rambler and a fervent opponent of hunting restrictions. Even if they could get Aspskär’s landowners to file this complex application, the chances of success would be vanishingly small. The brothers listen to Harald’s explanation in a mood of resignation: not even the law can protect the birds.
In the evening, John gathers all the money they have collected. He counts it up, does some quick calculations, and the following morning he calls his brothers into the kitchen. The residents of Loviisa have donated a total of 4,445 marks towards the protection of the island. It isn’t quite enough to purchase Aspskär outright, but it will be enough to rent it, then they can start protecting it themselves.
