60°10”N, 24°55”E #2
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 Garvagh kneels on the floor and gathers up the scattered fragments, swallowing back the tears and rage.
The egg in front of Gronvall 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 Gronvall 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.
Gronvall 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, and auctioneers 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.
If a 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 Gronvall.
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 the horizon 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.